Not My Mother's Hair: A Series of Akito Vignettes
by AmberPalette
Summary: Several snapshot scenes about Akito Sohma's possible attempts to make amends with various previously cursed family members. MANGAbased.
1. Prologue

Not My Mother's Hair:

A Series of Vignettes from the Diary of Akito Sohma

A Fruits Basket/Furuba Fanfiction by Amber Stitt

Chapter One 

**DISCLAIMER:** **WARNING, MANGA SPOILERS AFTER CHAPTER 98 IN THE DISCLAIMER! "Fruits Basket/Furuba" in its anime and manga formats are the creation and property of Takaya Natsuki and I in NO WAY claim ownership or profit thereof.**

**RATED PG FOR SWEARING AND MATURE THEMES (DEATH, CHILDHOOD TRAUMA). **

**This story lightly explores Akito Sohma's change-of-heart in the manga and her subsequent possible attempts to make amends with various family members. It is told from Akito's POV. If you still dislike her even after the manga brilliantly illustrates her personal pains and makes her a sympathetic character, take your cold heart elsewhere and don't bother to read this story, LOL. **

**If you do not believe that positive regard would ever occur between Tohru and Akito, you have only to acknowledge that THE MANGA ITSELF proposes peace and new friendship between them, in chapters 120-130 (released in Japan only as of July 2006). Don't flame me for sticking to CANON.**

**In this fanfiction, which will be comprised of SEVERAL SHORT CHAPTERS, Akito Sohma's gender is FEMALE, in correspondence with MANGA CANON POST-CHAPTER-98. The story depends HEAVILY on the MANGA as opposed to the anime. **

**This story takes place AFTER THE EVENTS OF CHAPTER 131 OF THE MANGA: Therefore the Sohmas are FREE from the Zodiac Curse and Akito is no longer dying. **

**WARNING: I SHIP CANON ONLY, WHICH MEANS I SHIP SHIGURE X AKITO, TOHRU X KYO, AND KURENO X ARISA. If you do not appreciate these pairings, refrain from reading this fanfiction and do not waste your time flaming me. **

**While I will probably never have time to revise this story, PLEASE ENJOY, R&R! **

Seven months and nine days since Shigure kissed me and kissed me, slowly slid my kimono off my body and pulled me against him, seven months and nine days since a tender dance between bedsheets expressed our love for each other and planted a child within me.

I am terrified and elated. Hope will be born, hope and change. This from the young woman who had thought herself doomed to an embittered and premature death only a few years ago. So I will gladly pardon you, and "eat my hat" as they say, if you laugh incredulously at what seems a ridiculous declaration. I suppose God will forgive you for being so cynical; even though my body housed a god for a period of over 19 years, I am no expert, but I would assume so. In any case, here it goes:

I am happy, I am married, I am pregnant, I am surrounded by a family that stays with me of its own free will, and therefore, I am starting over. Even though I have no redemptive features, even though I have nothing in my past but pain. I am starting over.

You would not think that this serendipity came directly proceeding a cruel berating by my own mother, but fate is strange when it comes to my life and family.

Though it has been my destiny to dress and behave like a man until fairly recently (thank fortune for my naturally textured, contralto purr of a voice) in order to fulfill my traditional inherited role as Head of the Sohma family, I have lately thrown caution to the wind and allowed my androgyny to be replaced by a mild…subtle…strain of femininity (it seemed useless, anyhow, to maintain the male guise, for I've never heard of a pregnant man). My cousins Rin and Kagura, and my dear new friend Tohru's schoolmates Arisa and Saki, have taught me the disturbingly elaborate art of mascara and nail polish. I have reluctantly allowed pastels into my wardrobe, as well as a single pair of high heels and a purse. I have discovered the bra and quite frankly marveled at its multiform varieties. We humans have excessive free time on our hands, it seems.

Shigure enjoys all of these changes immensely. He likes to growl teasingly at me like a middle school boy when I walk past in a black tank top and long dark skirt. He becomes very enthusiastic if I venture into the realms of jewelry and lipstick (this is still most rare). My dear Gure-Ko, he can't help his…amorous urges. And he has stopped lecherously chanting about high school girls, which I appreciate. I do love him, very much. He knows the crevices of my soul and he moves heaven and hell to make me laugh, always, no matter how he feels or what he is going through. I wasted many years being angry with my other self, my Shigure. But in my defense, he was even more wasteful and reckless with those same years apart from me. Ultimately, though…mistakes can be placed firmly beside us, and simply endured, as we move forward. This is the beauty of being alive.

Unfortunately it was because of my new grasp of mascara that my mother chose to gnaw on my self-confidence tonight. It was such a brief conversation, as I sat in the bathroom applying the black makeup to eyelashes I never realized I had, and she slipped up behind me in another of her sluttish red dresses. Her breasts spilled forward tastelessly in the mirror. She stank of cheap perfume. My morning sickness has lasted far past my first trimester, and the sweet oppressiveness of her scent made my stomach turn. Somehow I think she realized this.

"How attractive," my mother snickered. I hate her eyes. They are twice as pale as mine, a pale algae sort of green, and just as murky. "You are playing dress-up again. What is that? Black nail polish? From that strange Hanajima girl, no doubt. Do you think that sucking up to those cows and their cute, common, plastic ways will ingratiate you, Akito?"

I had mastered the application of the mascara without getting a single streak on the skin of my eyelids, but with this remark, my wrist jerked and a black blotch formed and caked above my left eyelid. I thought of my doctor, my cousin Hatori Sohma, and how I had blinded his eye in a rage. Was this cruelty so different or any less hurtful?

"Go away, Ren," I mumbled. My heart raced and my cheeks grew hot in fear and alarm. I was, in truth, afraid that she might be armed and intend to hurt the baby. I turned my swelling abdomen away from her so that any efforts might be obstructed. I put down the mascara and shielded my stomach with my hands. "You are not welcome. Leave."

She laughed. I hate how hollow her laugh is. It is forced, stale, high pitched. A sullen gull's cry. "You are transparent," she said. "I am not so stupid as to try to make you miscarry that worthless spawn when Hatori and my Shigure are in the other room and could easily link the blame to me—"

"YOUR Shigure! He was never yours!" I immediately berated myself for rising to the bait, for exploding. She always wants that. Just because she slept with him when he and I were teenagers. Ancient history. But she knows how it can still sting.

She touched my neck. I felt the goosebumps rising. Her hands are so cold, always so icy cold. I felt her nails digging in. I would be bruised there for days. But I didn't dare move. "You broke our bet. You allied yourself with the outsider, that Honda bitch that fancies the monster Kyo. You are no god, nothing special, nothing that deserves second chances. You know it, so you befriended her to keep her from being a threat."

"You're so stupid that it pains me." My voice was distant to me. She was already winning. I hate losing to her.

"AM I?" She laughed again. She drilled in the poison. I hate being her victim. I hate being a victim at all. I hate it. "You little harlot, little sick slut who would murder her own mother given the chance. Unnatural little monster, like the cat, it is no wonder you and he have become friends since you broke the Bond. The only one who ever loved you is dead. Your father is dead. You stole his love from me, but now that he is dead, I won't let you be loved. I will see you forsaken."

"Shut up, mother. You and your insanity, your…melodrama." Mother, why did I say mother? Was she really?

"Wallow in this façade of love and happiness, my child, my Akito. While it lasts." She was petting my neck. Petting it!

I took measured breaths. The baby was kicking. It made me brave, somehow. Maternal instinct. What Ren never possessed. And she called ME a monster. "Shut up and leave. Your love was the only illusion in this entire equation. "

"…I will leave gladly." Her hand had grown clammy on my skin, and she turned and slunk out, closing the door after herself. I watched her hair whipping around her alabaster shoulders as she vanished. Then I stripped naked and stepped into the shower. She had touched me and I felt ill from it. I stood naked in the stall with the lukewarm water rolling down my sore skin, spilling mascara from my eyes, spilling it like thin black paint.

I rubbed the soap bar along my arms and neck, where she had touched me, and thought on the blackness of my mother. Black, my mother's hair, if you caught it in some lights, it was a sort of plum color, an iridescent blue-violet like oil rising off a puddle of rainwater in a parking lot. Filthy beauty.

My mother has hair like an oil slick. It's not just that it's sleek and black, no, not just that it drips and oozes down her pale, slender swan neck like ink staining snow, like a thin black waterfall on a frosted windowpane, no no no no, reader. It's that it _feels_ that way as well. It feels greasy, it suffocates the pores—it feels as though your skin is the down of a white dove foolishly descended upon an oil-slickened ocean surface.

When I was a little girl—feigning, even then, boyhood, yes, even then, before I had to chop short my hair and bound my growing, aching breasts—when I was only six years old, and she still called me "son" (it was not "daughter," but it would do for a frightened and lonely little girl who wanted her mother's love), I would try to touch her hair. I would imagine that it must feel like silk or velvet, or the satin of child's ribbons or a brand-new kimono.

Even then she was cruel to me, for she knew I only wanted to hold her hair and feel she belonged to and cherished me. She knew I just wanted to clutch her hair and shout, "that is my hair, too, my mother's beautiful raven hair is my own!" parading around, toddling around, with a child's dear and foolish pride. So, in her cruelty, my mother Ren Sohma would rob me both of my security and my childish happiness, wearing her hair down so that it was just barely too short for my reach. She would swoosh it around while she slipped among guests at Sohma family banquets. She would wait until my hands were within inches of the very bottom tendrils—then whip it away, supposedly being coy with one of my father's many male successors, supposedly thrusting back her head to laugh—robbing me of my simple desire to touch some part of her.

But one day I succeeded. One day when I was six, and she was on the telephone with my doctor and cousin Hatori, who was, then, barely a teenager. She was berating him for what she perversely saw as falling behind in his medical studies. Her hair drizzled down her back like a plait made of midnight.

I reached out and grabbed it. Hard. And I pulled—yanked. At first I had only meant to just stand there and cradle it and smile, and call it mine. But once I had reached it, and realized how many times she had denied it me, I became so very gorged with my own rage.

I regurgitated, I burst, by pulling and pulling and pulling on that plait, as hard as I could. I was disappointed and furious—my mother's beautiful jet black hair was so slippery and greasy, it was not a mother's soft and gentle hair, but a revolting oil slick. An oil slick! I don't think she ever washed it, I don't think she even does now. Such deceptively beautiful garbage. I wish that my hair were a different color, rather than this deep-bluish-black of Ren's. I will never ever let it grow long. Never ever.

My pulling became fierce jerking, and I started to cry, quietly for some reason, as though I didn't mind my rage being obvious but was ashamed of my grief. I have always been that way, and only recently have learned to allow others to see the sorrow and fear behind my anger, so that they might understand and comfort rather than be afraid of me, a mere frightened girl. But not then. Not when I was a child of six years.

My mother snarled, and the phone crashed against its wall-mount receiver. A crushing blow—I felt dazzling pain in my temple and even after the milky white blur of nerves and blue dots cleared from my vision, I could not see out of my right eye, because my mother had taken a nearby china salad bowl and crashed it, lettuce, dressing, and china, into my forehead, and cracked it open.

It is strange how well I take pain—perhaps because my entire life has consisted of curse twinges, cramps, aches, and morphine—but in any case at the time I merely stood there watching blood, vinaigrette dressing, and baby spinach leaves drip from my head onto linoleum, and let go of my mother's hair, so that she was enabled to simply walk calmly out of the room. I am told that ten minutes passed before she casually mentioned my condition to another maid, who dashed hysterically into the kitchen and found me, and called Hatori.

But anyway. That is why I say my mother's hair is an oil slick. Suffocating. Unbending. Cold. Deadly. Ren herself is an oil slick.

I have been so joyful—though my face is not a candid one, and so my joy comes in whispered smiles and a faint glow in the eyes, rather than raucous laughter—to be reminded that Ren's word is not uncontested, by my family, who have embraced and cried with me, and by caring and compassionate interlopers such as Tohru-Chan…that is to say, Miss Tohru Honda…who could almost be credited with single-handedly catalyzing the end of the Zodiac Curse with which my family and I have so long suffered. It is my turn to comfort. I only fear as to how I shall orchestrate and systematize this compassion, and if that comforting will be too little, too late.

For I have done much evil to the people who have struggled to love me. I have been such a capricious child and spiteful, tyrannical fool. I have done hateful and hurtful things, so certain that I myself would be hated, giving people quick reasons to push me away and despise me, instead of lying in agonizing wait for them to realize my worthlessness and light off of me like crows from the thin branches of a barren tree. But no more.

No more. I have been told that I have worth. I have been unconditionally loved, and firmly pushed. I have been given the tools that will enable me to save myself.

For my first chance came this evening, when I got out of the shower. Right after my mother accosted me. In the form of my smallest and youngest cousin, Kisa Sohma, the Tiger.

Kisa…Kisa is precious to me now. I want so badly to protect her. I want her to trust me. I don't want to do it the way I did it to Yuki though—Yuki who still fears emotional intimacy with anyone because of my stupid, vitriolic meddling. I will not harm anyone else that way again. Yuki I will atone to, somehow, but first I must do right by my little cousin Kisa, who also suffers from sickly self-esteem because of her previous ostracizing from classmates—because of the Curse that is now lifted. I must show Kisa that she need not be afraid of anything when her cousin Akito will look after and guide her. Dear, sweet, selfless little Kisa-Chan, so much like an elementary-school-aged Tohru.

I stepped out of the shower with my mascara still streaked in black down my cheeks, with that damned oil slick hair of my mother's plastered to my face, dripping shower water and draping myself in a comfortingly warm towel. I tied it like a robe. Careful of my swelling middle, I slowly paced to the mirror and stared at a reflection that I found, at the moment, pathetic. I allowed myself a self-pitying scoff, a sort of snorting chuckle.

"How attractive, Aki," I crooned at myself, half-mimicking my mother, arching an eyebrow, placing my hands on my hips, and jutting out my irritatingly large pregnant stomach. The stupid thing. It makes physical grace and charm impossible.

I have recently learned the immeasurable value of having a sense of humor in all situations.

I heard a giggle, and felt a tiny tug, almost as small as a kick from my unborn child—a girl, like Kisa. Like me. A girl.

I jumped and looked down to my right, and there Kisa herself stood, leaning hesitantly against my side and bashfully smiling. Her hands a bit shaky, she wrapped her arms around one of mine. "Hi, Akito-San," she squeaked.

Thus my chance arrived.

You must understand, I am barely five feet and four inches tall. Before I became pregnant, I had to eat and nourish my way, with Hatori's help, above the 100-pound weight mark. And yet, I could pick Kisa up with one arm and throw her any distance. She is truly what my Gure-Ko would quip, in his "romantic" and silly spats of French, as "petite." But what she has allowed me to do, with her willingness to forgive tonight, is enormous. What will follow, I pray, is some sort of chain reaction of epiphany, some way I can find myself helping and counseling and nurturing every single formerly cursed Sohma that ever came under a harsh word by my tongue or a blow by my hand.

If you are willing to listen, I will share my redemption with you.


	2. My Tiger's Voice

**Not My Mother's Hair:**

**A Series of Vignettes from the Diary of Akito Sohma**

A Fruits Basket/Furuba Fanfiction by Amber Stitt

**Chapter Two: My Tiger's Voice**

**DISCLAIMER:** **WARNING, MANGA SPOILERS AFTER CHAPTER 98 IN THE DISCLAIMER! "Fruits Basket/Furuba" in its anime and manga formats are the creation and property of Takaya Natsuki and I in NO WAY claim ownership or profit thereof.**

**RATED PG FOR SWEARING AND MATURE THEMES (DEATH, CHILDHOOD TRAUMA). **

**This story lightly explores Akito Sohma's change-of-heart in the manga and her subsequent possible attempts to make amends with various family members. It is told from Akito's POV. If you still dislike her even after the manga brilliantly illustrates her personal pains and makes her a sympathetic character, take your cold heart elsewhere and don't bother to read this story, LOL. **

**If you do not believe that positive regard would ever occur between Tohru and Akito, you have only to acknowledge that THE MANGA ITSELF proposes peace and new friendship between them, in chapters 120-130 (released in Japan only as of July 2006). Don't flame me for sticking to CANON.**

**In this fanfiction, which will be comprised of SEVERAL SHORT CHAPTERS, Akito Sohma's gender is FEMALE, in correspondence with MANGA CANON POST-CHAPTER-98. The story depends HEAVILY on the MANGA as opposed to the anime. **

**This story takes place AFTER THE EVENTS OF CHAPTER 131 OF THE MANGA: Therefore the Sohmas are FREE from the Zodiac Curse and Akito is no longer dying. **

**WARNING: I SHIP CANON ONLY, WHICH MEANS I SHIP SHIGURE X AKITO, TOHRU X KYO, AND KURENO X ARISA. If you do not appreciate these pairings, refrain from reading this fanfiction and do not waste your time flaming me. **

**While I will probably never have time to revise this story, PLEASE ENJOY, R&R! **

Kisa Sohma was staring at me—at her surrogate god, since her birth—with wariness and pity, as I stood at my mirror dripping on linoleum, in only a white towel. I wasn't sure whether to be relieved or humiliated. "Gure-Kun told me I could find you in here and that you were….happy and…and calm…a lot lately. I heard you weren't …sick anymore… from Ha'ri. So. I just wanted to say hi…and…see how your baby is…Akito-San."

Oh God. Fortune. Powers of auspiciousness.

Bless this tiny brave child. Bless her three times over. The most sincere prayer I've ever made. At which point, of course, the capricious forces of hormone fluctuation seized my pregnant physiology and gave me an overpowering need to blubber. At the very least, I could feel my eyes brimming over, and I admit I am still far too afraid of seeming weak to show tears even to a child. Perhaps especially to one—children regard their adult caretakers with such unblinking, expectant, trusting eyes. Disappointing them is pure hell.

I jerked out my hand just past her head, my movements spasmodic, even violent, in my alien state of embarrassed, high-strung nerves, and clutched a box of tissues. Kisa gasped, let out a soft scream, and cradled her own head, backed into the corner by the door.

I froze, and scowled, uncomprehending.

Then I realized it. She was shielding herself from me. She thought I was going to hit her. She whimpered. "I'm sorry…I'll go!"

I think I stopped breathing, as though I'd been kicked in the ribs. Ah, Kisa. I had done this to her. What my mother had done to me. I was surprised at the shrillness of my voice as I strained to clarify my actions: "NO! No no, Kisa, it's alright, I… I'M sorry." Like an imbecile, I waved the Kleenex box agitatedly above my head, sprinkling shampoo-scented shower droplets all over her shielded head.

As slowly as a butterfly emerging from a pale maple-colored cocoon, Kisa lifted her head. Her golden eyes gaped. "Um…oh."

"Sorry, it's my mascara…" I fumbled with words and with tissue, wiping the streaks off my face. "I forgot to take it off before I got in the shower…well I mean I…was just getting…um…this." Again I waved the box at her. Again she flinched.

Good, good, genius, brandish something at her that you used to throw at her, among far harder objects. This was going to be difficult. "I'm sorry." I put it down, and sighed.

Crap. Just. Crap. Freaking steaming pile of insurmountable crap! I plotted to scratch out Shigure's eyes when next I saw him. SCRATCH THEM OUT!

Damn it.

Kisa nodded gently, even encouragingly, as though I, not she, were the child frightened of the volcanic older cousin. The reversal of roles was so absurd to me that I was compelled to speak—to say anything, anything at all that might ease the tension, and make her happy. "I…I have developed a curious taste for animal crackers, Kisa."

What? Oh, that was hideously pathetic.I think I must have blushed, because my face was suddenly burning.

But then she…smiled…covered her mouth quickly…and this gesture could not entirely muffle the hidden laugh which trickled out like droplets of sweet fresh water from between her fingers.

I had made her laugh.

All of a sudden, all of life and its enigmas became less daunting, and more clear, to me. I had done something that had benefited someone, for the very first time, no matter how miniscule. Making her happy had the oddest effect of making me happy too. I know that it sounds ludicrous, but understanding that pattern….how offering contentment is contagious….that is really all it takes to set a person on the right trajectory. It really is all it takes. Tohru told me that. I thought it was rather corny at the time, but I didn't say anything because she was tired and ill from being hospitalized—that awful, scary time that she fell off a cliff on the family grounds during a landslide—and I didn't want to add to her burdens with unkind laughter. Now I realize it was another of her deceptively plain looking gems of deep wisdom.

Kisa was leaning on me more boldly, hugging my bare arm tighter against her soft blue cardigan sweater. My lips tightened—I had not realized that I, too, had begun to grin. My cheeks felt sore from it, but I liked it. "Yes, it's very strange—you see, when we were all cursed, I felt like some sort of despot or… or cannibal eating my own family whenever I came across a cookie ox, or sparrow, or …snake, or dog, or….ha, tiger," and here I found myself gently poking her tiny upturned nose. "I'm afraid there were many cookie tigers that narrowly escaped when I was hungry."

Again Kisa giggled. Again something situated in my chest fluttered and then soared, and I felt light, buoyant, unshackled and unworried, for the first time in my entire recollection. I felt brave—like maybe there was a point to trying. That in and of itself would make a sufficient grave inscription: "_Here lies Akito, who tried after all._"

I tossed that detestable inherited oil slick hair from my face, and continued with a concerted effort at pleasantness, "But now that we are all free, I don't feel quite so disgusting indulging in that snack. Although I was pretty mean to you all anyway for a very long time….and that isn't funny. And I'm very sorry about it, Kisa. I will prove to you that I mean that. And it won't happen again."

Maybe I shouldn't have made that last claim. I shall _attempt_, with every fiber in my body, to keep my own high-handed cruelty and childish temper tantrums from recurring. Yet, I don't want to break promises with absolute claims of "won't" or "never again." But at any rate….

"…I like ginger snaps," Kisa squeaked in reply, nodding and regarding me with her bright ore eyes as though this remark were of great urgency. "I think I should get you some because they're good for your stomach and Ha'ri told me being pregnant gives you nausea."

I was stunned by the compassion in her eyes. Did she understand what I had said? Was a child of eleven years that intelligent? And was, then, this veiled "I forgive you" of hers truly so urgent?

Well. I treated it as such. "Those are good too," I promptly agreed. And then, seeing worry on her face, I added, "Very good. Great even. My favorite, I think….thank you, Kisa."

Her smile simply blossomed. Her round little cheeks warmed with delight at our common taste, our real and voluntarily sealed bond—however inconsequential it was that we mutually enjoyed ginger snaps.

I had the overpowering urge to scoop her up and tightly hug her—but I didn't just yet. I was terrified of smothering yet another human being placed in my care and under my authority.

It did not matter, because she hugged me first, around my waist—enthusiastically, as though she wanted to do it before she lost the nerve. Her relief was palpable. She even giggled a third time.

I couldn't keep from gasping. The pressure on my belly was slightly uncomfortable, but I didn't dare scold her. Instead I returned the embrace, my lips curling upwards once more as I heard the muffled "you're welcome" uttered into my shoulder, where her caramel head rested.

Then Kisa pulled away from me—I felt a painful yank in my chest. I had wanted to stroke her hair and kiss the crown of her head, and cradle her a moment longer, just as naturally as one has a need for food or sleep. Yes, I have always been a person for whom physical expression, be it a possessive embrace or an angry slap, comes easy, but this was different—it was an inexplicable desire to protect and comfort this soft, shy child.

I think it must have been that curious thing that Hatori calls "maternal instinct" growing ever more active inside me. For in that moment, as she stood there pigeon-toed and sheepishly smiling at me through her butterscotch bangs, I wanted nothing more than to accept the mantle of a full-grown woman with a daughter of my own. I was gladder than ever of my pregnancy. I felt foolish for this need, foolish and vulnerable and even rather sappy. But I clung to it. A need for someone who loves and connects to you from their first breath.

One who is always part of you and never really leaves you.

How destructively I had always thrashed about in an attempt to quench this thirst, until now. Until now.

"What is it, Kisa?" I crooned.

"I just realized Gure-Kun has some of those cookies in his briefcase, Akito-San!" The Tiger clapped together her small hands as if in rapturous prayer. "I'll go get the bag—for you!"

She had such a sweet, soft voice. Like the flesh of a peach. Hinting that everything about her was just as breakably tender, yet so very…brave. Brave little Kisa. How had I been able, once, to backhand this harmless child as I stormed barefoot down the halls of this very house, threatened and embittered by the sight of her closeness to our cousin, the Sheep, Hiro? How had I been so callously able to hurt her—just like a bully, an overgrown child, myself? Apparently blindness is not always a physical state.

"Aki-San, are you alright?" Kisa breathed, her warm lemon eyes widening. She backed, suddenly, towards the open door.

"Oh…yes…" I must have gotten swept away in another brooding reverie—something that my family still fears to witness, because it used to signal the onset of one of my helpless rages. Hastily, I drew myself back to the present. "Yes, I'm sorry, Kisa. Yes, yes, I would love some ginger snaps. Could you go get them while I get dressed?"

She spoke again. Peach flesh. Or…silverware gently clinking against crystal. A horrible sound to silence. "Oh, I would love to! I'll be right back!" And out she dashed. "Don't move!"

Yes, a horrible sound to silence, Kisa's voice.

I decided then and there that no matter what, I would never tell Kisa to be quiet. Never.

I heard that, for a long while, exhausted and injured by the constant insults and cruelties of her classmates, Kisa had stopped speaking, and her frustrated, scared mother had nearly rejected her. Shigure, who has an atrocious habit (among many) to gossip, had taken this news to me on my back porch one cold Saturday morning a few years ago. He had watched me slyly from the corner of his eye while dragging and sighing out smoke from one of his cigarettes (which I have commanded him, rest assured, to stop using, with our child coming). And he watched me for a reaction. Watched and waited.

At the time, I hid my disgust and fury towards Kisa's mother. I sneered and made some highhanded bullshit claim that Kisa was "privileged" with an "opportunity" to understand what the true burden of the Sohma Curse was. With covetous pride, I had concealed my initial inclination to band together with Kisa in hurt and outrage towards our rejecting mothers—even from myself. Earlier, when Momiji Sohma, the Rabbit, had experienced an even more extreme rejection from his mother, I had behaved similarly.

All idiocy. I should have told them both at once how well I understood their fear and sorrow. Their solitude.

Tohru has taught me something else. We are all of us rice balls in a fruit basket, my family and I. We must stay together. Tonight, I took that chance with Kisa.

Ten minutes passed and I had slipped into my favorite new crimson kimono. I tied it loosely at the midriff and irritably readjusted it several times as Kisa stepped into my bedroom, across the hallway from the shower. The baby was quite active, insistently kicking and kicking in the area around my navel; I can tell you, she (I hope that it is a she!) is sure to have either her mother's temper or her father's sense of humor. Or both—wouldn't that be something—a most formidable child!

At the moment, I attempted to pacify her (yes, _her,_ please, Fortune!), doing my best at a soft, deep humming lullaby that I had learned from my most beloved cousin, Kureno Sohma, the Rooster—the very first person whom I allowed freedom from the Curse. Ha'ri told me that unborn babies can hear their mother's voices, so I have been hoping these frequent lullabies amount to some comfort for mine. Indeed, the kicking began to decrease in force and frequency. I chuckled and placed a hand on my stomach. "You know what you want…and you firmly demand it….You _are _going to be a lot like me. Your poor father. He will be wrapped around your pinky—OH. I thought you had stopped that. God, settle down, you." I began to hum again.

Kisa gasped and put a sandwich bag full of ginger snaps down at the foot of my bed, reaching out and putting her hand next to mine on top of my stomach. This made me feel oddly shy, but I let her investigate. I can only imagine how little girls and boys perceive pregnancy. They say that the stork, birds, and bees myths are still in circuit. Amusing. People really do underestimate the intelligence of children. When I was a child-goddess, bearing the core of the Curse, I always knew far more than my adult parents and cousins and friends thought I knew. It was a cause for much pain.

"_Is it going to kick again_?" my little Tiger cousin whispered enthusiastically. Her eyes bulged in awe.

I laughed outright, flinging back my head. I could not help it. She was so charming, with her naivety, her reverence and amazement. "I don't know. We'll see." I was helplessly grinning again, anything but a feared and respected family head.

Kisa nodded solemnly and spoke like a miniature scientist. "I have always wanted to investigate two things. One, a double rainbow, and two, what a kicking baby feels like."

I laughed again, with growing delight at my company. "Admirable lifetime goals, Kisa-Chan."

She nodded gleefully and, while the baby was still, hopped up on my bed and retrieved two cookies. "One for me, one for you." She smiled and offered me the larger one. I wanted to hug her a second time. "And we will eat them and wait, if it is okay with you, Akito-San."

"Perfectly fine. Only do me one favor, drop this 'San' business. It's stuffy and formal and it doesn't work between friends." My heart palpitated slightly, because it had been a bold statement of closeness and I was not certain whether Kisa was ready for it.

But she seemed to like this idea. Though her face remained solemn, her eyes glistened. She leaned against my side while she planted her hand on my stomach, and waited. She scowled studiously, munching on her cookie. I was not hungry, but for her, I swallowed mine down.

"Guess it fell back asleep." She took her hand off my stomach. "Your voice is sort of like water," she yawned, head resting on my shoulder once more. There was something stiff to the way she cuddled against me—I understood. I would be patient, and earn her trust.

"Oh?" I cocked my head. "That's quite a coincidence, I had just been thinking about how happy the entire family was when you started speaking again a few years ago."

She smiled sleepily up at me—I knew I had said something right, because she pressed one of her warm cheeks against my neck and closed her eyes. "Oh, yeah. I didn't know everyone cared that much."

"Oh, they always did. Still do."

"Thanks, A...Aki-Chan."

Aki-Chan. Priceless. "You're welcome. What's this water business again? About my voice?"

"Oh…yeah, well, I sort of think your voice is really deep and…liquidy…flowy….like how water flows over rocks in a creek? Like a really slow current…Or something. My mom is sort of tone deaf so her lullabies aren't quite as pretty as yours, Aki-Chan…but I still love them…because they're from her….Aki-Chan, what's it like being a mom?"

This was a difficult question, and though Kisa could never understand it, trying to answer it both warmed and stung me…for one like me, who never had a real mother, it was a difficult thing to even detect in oneself. Perhaps both our mothers had once rejected us, but my mother had not bothered to try again for my sake. She had never sung me tone-deaf lullabies. "Well." I cleared my throat. "Being a mom….Ah…I suppose…it's like this." I gestured my free hand, behind her, at our snuggling forms, and at our easy, comfortable conversation. "At least I hope so, Kisa. Because this is very nice."

She nestled deeper into my neck. "Yeah. I can't wait to grow up, then. And be a mom. And have a job and be important and stuff."

"Yes, you can wait. Just be happy with yourself…you as you are right now. That is very special already."

She said nothing, but soon her small arms wrapped as best they could around my neck, and she squeezed. I breathed an indulgent laugh and let myself be held like some sort of human teddy bear. I felt trusted, favored, shared with, allowed something. I shifted weight so that she did not have to strain so much to reach her short arms around my shoulders.

Drowsiness soon took hold of me in the warm, safe room, with my forgiving child cousin holding me, and I must have nodded off. My dreams were soft and serene.


	3. My Rabbit's Name

**Not My Mother's Hair:**

**A Series of Vignettes from the Diary of Akito Sohma**

**A Fruits Basket/Furuba Fanfiction by Amber Stitt**

**Chapter Three: My Rabbit's Name**

**DISCLAIMER:** **WARNING, MANGA SPOILERS AFTER CHAPTER 98 IN THE DISCLAIMER! "Fruits Basket/Furuba" in its anime and manga formats are the creation and property of Takaya Natsuki and I in NO WAY claim ownership or profit thereof.**

**RATED PG FOR SWEARING AND MATURE THEMES (DEATH, CHILDHOOD TRAUMA). **

**This story lightly explores Akito Sohma's change-of-heart in the manga and her subsequent possible attempts to make amends with various family members. It is told from Akito's POV. If you still dislike her even after the manga brilliantly illustrates her personal pains and makes her a sympathetic character, take your cold heart elsewhere and don't bother to read this story, LOL. **

**If you do not believe that positive regard would ever occur between Tohru and Akito, you have only to acknowledge that THE MANGA ITSELF proposes peace and new friendship between them, in chapters 120-133 (released in Japan only as of September 2006). Don't flame me for sticking to CANON.**

**In this fanfiction, which will be comprised of SEVERAL SHORT CHAPTERS, Akito Sohma's gender is FEMALE, in correspondence with MANGA CANON POST-CHAPTER-98. The story depends HEAVILY on the MANGA as opposed to the anime. **

**This story takes place AFTER THE EVENTS OF CHAPTER 133 OF THE MANGA: Therefore the Sohmas are FREE from the Zodiac Curse and Akito is no longer dying. **

**WARNING: I SHIP CANON ONLY, WHICH MEANS I SHIP SHIGURE X AKITO, TOHRU X KYO, AND KURENO X ARISA. If you do not appreciate these pairings, refrain from reading this fanfiction and do not waste your time flaming me. **

**While I will probably never have time to revise this story, PLEASE ENJOY, R&R! **

Eight months now and my ankles keep swelling with water retention. It is hard to stand upright with my skewed center of gravity. Hatori has been nagging me daily to take a walk around the Main House grounds, fellowshipping with the pines, cherry blossoms, and hibiscus. It makes my feet ache but I am told that it benefits my blood circulation and oxygen level. Sometimes I want to curse his ludicrous conscientiousness!

Yet, for the baby, I'll do anything.

Ever since our first night of true bonding, Kisa had taken up the responsibility of walking with me, to make sure no rocks, snakes, or landslides caused me peril. I assured her that there were no snakes on Sohma Estate aside that blessed fruitcake Ayame, but Kisa was obstinately serious, and so I let my little cousin pamper me. I soon grew quite accustomed to the imaginative bouquets of wildflowers she picked for me on our journeys, or the way she gasped and giggled at a passing flock of birds.

One early evening however, Kisa was obliged to stay after school to discuss some problematic pre-algebra homework with her mathematics teacher, and I was left to manage my daily dusk walk alone.

I admit I was disappointed. But Kisa's cousin and crush, the Sheep Hiro, a boy barely a year her senior who reminded me powerfully of a minature Kyo the Cat, often accompanied us, and tonight he appeared sulkily in my porch doorway claiming that Kisa had sent him home to join me. I smiled and began the slow, arduous process of standing up. He hunched his shoulders and went to assist me.

Hiro and I had always gotten along relatively well; for many years I had been poisoned to believe that all women, like my mother, were cunning and manipulative, and had preferred the company of men—even, for a time, preferred to BE a man. While I am glad this has significantly changed, I was also happy that it would take a bit less work on my part to break any awkward silences with my pugnacious sheep.

A challenge, however, still awaited me; there was another young boy in my family whom I had horribly slighted, scratched, and pushed away. For I had once been frightened of his uncanny capacity to perceive wounds and try to cheerfully mend them.

My Rabbit, Momiji Sohma, was loitering by the garden fountain as Hiro escorted me down the path.

A gasp fluttered in my throat. I jerked to a halt, yanking Hiro, who grunted, back with me. I raised my hand. "Momij—"

"Akito-San!" The exclamation of my name reverberated against my aborted greeting, and drowned it. Approaching us from the left was a tall European woman with rosy Nordic skin and hair like curled ribbons of yellow sleet. She was smiling in an elegant and obligatory way, her pouting lips just slightly curled. Most men in the Sohma family considered Momiji's German mother—who had voluntarily undergone memory erasure by Hatori in order to rid herself of the burden of a "freak" child—to be quite beautiful.

I did not. But then again, I have always been accused of assigning physical distaste towards the people whom I dislike. When I was foolish enough to loathe Tohru, who is pretty in an innocent and fresh sort of way, I had called her plain, even ugly.

At any rate. I think you understand the larger point I'm getting at.

I gathered my diplomacy and forced a smile as Momiji's mother took and squeezed my hands. Good God, she had long, thin, cold fingers, decorated with far too many bright, shining rings.

Beautiful but cold.

Like her.

Like my own mother. Like Ren. "Yes?" I hissed through the teeth of my false grin.

"I wish to congratulate your expectant motherhood." She inclined her head and placed a hand on my rigid arm. "I am told your due date is at hand. I will have to knit the child a sweater when I can get a free moment. I am sure my daughter Momo would love to help me as well—you've met Momo, haven't you? Her father tells me she is a miniature version of myself!"

I whetted my lips. Slowly. Buying what scraps of tact I possessed some time to exact control over my actions. "Yes, I have met Momo. Thank you. I eagerly await the delivery."

"Do you think it will be a boy or a girl?"

"I hope it is a girl."

"Oh, and she will be just like you, Akito-San, think of that, of knowing my happiness!"

"…Yes, imagine that."

There was a whispered rustle in the foliage behind us. Hiro scowled mutinously at the blonde flatterer, then suddenly stepped aside. I frowned, glancing over my shoulder. "Hiro, what…?"

And then… "Konnichiwa!" Momiji bounded into our tense circle and seized my arm in a fierce hug.

The orphaned Japanese-German exclaimed a hello to his living mother, who somehow still did not know him, in their shared language. I cringed down at the flaxen crown of hair tickling my nose as my cousin leaned companionably against me. Momiji had his corporate mogul father's molten-chocolate eyes, but he had inherited his mother's steely lemon-blond waves of hair.

It would have been nice if the woman, who abandoned her son from birth, had seen a bond between them that was deeper than hair color. But she had not. And I, his head of house, the mother, in a way, of all the Sohmas, had failed to console him. No, I had punched him. I had clawed him. I had called him "condescending" for simply asking me why I had been so unhappy for so many years. I had rejected him all over again. I had helped him reenact his most feared and agonizing of traumas.

Perhaps these were all reasons why my gait weakened and my knees slightly buckled at sight of Momiji handing both myself and his unwitting mother the same flowers that Kisa ordinarily selected as my bouquet. "For the lovely ladies," he chirped.

"How sweet," the tepid woman tepidly crooned with her tepid smile, while tepidly slipping the flowers into the pocket of her pantsuit, against her tepidly beating heart.

She bowed to us both. I wanted to scratch out her cool unfeeling eyes. Perhaps if she hadn't chosen that moment to leave, I might have. Fortunately, she wandered back inside the main house.

I gave a measured sigh through teeth that I suddenly realized were still bared. "…Momiji…"

"What a coincidence, huh? Like your flowers? I heard Kisa usually gave them to you so I came to give you some!"

"..Momiji…" I angled my head and tossed my hair from my eyes so that I could fiercely appraise him. He was a short boy; we could gaze eye-to-eye if he would only look at me.

"I think I picked all your favorites, Aki-Chan!"

"Momiji. Stop."

He was looking away from me, looking away at the dirt and rocks this whole time. Smiling. "How is the baby? I remember when Momo was a baby." His little sister whom he could never quite touch. His little sister who replaced him. Still he was smiling. Smiling, smiling. "I've never seen a cuter baby!"

"Momiji!" I grabbed his shoulders, without meaning to, tightly, digging in my nails. "I told you to stop!"

Hiro balked. "Crap," he mumbled.

Though his silly smile remained, the Rabbit cowered as I spoke. Everyone cowered and mumbled at me. I would fix that for good, I would fix it with every single member of my family, so that they could strut and shout around me. "Momiji…please, I hate watching you suffer… I know that's hard to believe but I…I.."

And suddenly he was flinging bold remarks right back at me. "Do you think mother will love me now, with my curse lifted? It's a dumb thing to ask, I know, I ought to be content with the people who love me unconditionally…" He was holding a few extra blossoms—crushing them in his palm with his cheerfully disguised fervency.

I wanted to embrace him, I knew what it felt like, I KNEW.

"I am one of those people, Momiji." The words were born, made audible, before I even considered what effect they might have. I was terrified by this, yet propelled onward. Hiro stood to our right, watching us cautiously.

Momiji frowned and laughed—it was saturated with held-back tears. "Oh, well, I.." He stared down at my right wrist.

"I will be your foolish traveler for a moment so that you can take a rest," I persisted. "You may cry now. All you like."

I have never seen Momiji cry, but whatever I had said or done had been the perfect catalyst. He covered his mouth with the back of his forearm and leaned over past me, and wept and wept. "I'm sorry," he whimpered, "I am usually much stronger than this, and you are enduring so much change right now that I must not be weak…"

"There is nothing weak in tears worth the shedding," I fiercely retorted. "You are a kind and loving person in great pain. A person to whom I am indebted for sharing his wisdom with me, after I did nothing but spurn you. Momiji, even if you told me you were furious with your mother, even if you said you hated her, I would not think less of you—you have every right."

He shook his head and laughed—it almost sounded whimsical, delighted, through those wrenching tears, that swollen, red, puffy-lidded face. He was beautiful.

"Damn it, I mean it," I said.

Hiro sighed. "Yeah," he muttered.

"I know you do, Aki-Chan," Momiji giggled. As though I were the beloved child and he the parent, he scooped me into the embrace that I had been too timid to offer. I tried to compensate by squeezing him so tightly that, somehow, maybe his sorrow would be wrung out of him—like grimy washbasin water is wrung from something pure and clean.

I felt braver. "Then what..?"

"I still love her. I still cherish her memory. It's like I told Tohru. I want always to cling to her in memory. I don't regret knowing her."

"Of course you do," I snarled, wanting to protect him, to defend him. "She is your mother. It is natural. She is your mother." Your mother. My eyes burned. I squeezed him again, and finally let go.

He was smiling at the dirt and rocks again. He sat on a particularly sturdy boulder…then hopped upright and carefully guided me to it. "Sit, dear momma to be, sit…you see….it's just that there's a parent-teacher conference on Friday night…."

"…Okay." I nodded.

"I've never needed to attend one before but I'm to be awarded for excellence in language skills…"

I beamed. "Oh Momiji, that is most commendable."

He bowed slightly in thanks. "But I don't have a parent to attend…dad's going to be overseas…and it's embarrassing…"

Silence.

I swallowed, gathered my nerves, and plunged into the bewildered quiet: "Momiji, tell me something, with your wisdom of languages. What is something a mother would call one of her children in Germany?"

He cocked his head at me. "_Liebchen_, usually. I can teach you loads of German if you like!" His face brightened.

"I would like that. And I think that I will call you _liebchen_ from now on, Momiji." I folded my hands in front of me, softly begging penance, on display for his scrutiny. "And I would like to go to this conference and accept your award with you. But only if it would make you happy."

Hiro gawked at me. It didn't particularly ease my nerves.

Momiji blinked. "Are you…serious?"

I coughed. The temptation to retract the presumption that I had just made was potent. I disregarded it. "Well…yes." My cheeks dully glowed. "I suppose I am."

Momiji's fair curly head shook from side to side several times. His eyebrows climbed higher and higher on his forehead until they vanished under his bangs. "I…I…" He sniffled and burst into joyous laughter. I jumped, and he laughed even louder. Inexplicably, he vigorously clapped his hands.

"Stupid rabbit," Hiro growled, covering his ears. But he, too, was smiling.

Momiji finally finished his stuttering sentence. "I think you are brilliant, Aki-Chan, and as changed as a butterfly from a worm!"

"Oh I." I was mortified and outrageously pleased all at once. My God, my face was hot. "I…well I…"

He patted my stomach. I do not understand why all the world likes to touch a pregnant woman's stomach as if she is some sort of auspicious female Buddha. Or perhaps Momiji was just that affectionate. I would have felt blessed to be his mother. "Okay momma-to-be," he trilled, "you said it, eh? You're really getting sweet these days! Be careful, momma-in-progress, I might just start trusting you!"

"Momma-in progress! Stop that," I chuckled, fanning my face. Oh I was flustered. It happens more often than I usually care to admit. "Why don't you stop talking about ME and sing or something? Sing your song!"

"A what? My song? HA!"

Hiro, too, snorted. Hiro is a stoic little man. Not one to mince words. It's adorable.

"Your song!" I shrugged. "I thought you had a song! Tohru told me you sang it to her at the hot springs!"

He giggled, earlobes warming. "Nah."

"Yes you do…it's…something like… 'who's in the forest humming in the trees…the biiiirds and the beeees sing Mo-meee-jeee…' " I found myself actually singing. I was surprised at the fact that I was completely on pitch and that my somewhat textured contralto actually sounded pretty in a smoky sort of way.

Hiro was now laughing uncontrollably. I kept singing. I was sure my face had now graduated to a scarlet hue. But I was actually enjoying myself.

The baby kicked emphatically. I jolted and then laughed at the end of the verse, grasping my stomach.

Momiji gave a gleeful sort of shriek, dancing in place and again applauding me. "ENCORE!"


	4. My Monkey's Confidence, My Ox's Wit

**Not My Mother's Hair: A Series of Vignettes from the Diary of Akito Sohma**

**By Amber Stitt**

**Chapter Four: My Monkey's Confidence, My Ox's Wit  
DISCLAIMER:** **WARNING, MANGA SPOILERS AFTER CHAPTER 98 IN THE DISCLAIMER! "Fruits Basket/Furuba" in its anime and manga formats are the creation and property of Takaya Natsuki and I in NO WAY claim ownership or profit thereof.**

**RATED PG FOR SWEARING AND MATURE THEMES (DEATH, CHILDHOOD TRAUMA). **

**This story explores Akito Sohma's change-of-heart in the manga and her subsequent possible attempts to make amends with various family members. It is told from Akito's POV. If you still dislike her even after the manga brilliantly illustrates her personal pains and makes her a sympathetic character, take your cold heart elsewhere and don't bother to read this story, LOL. **

**If you do not believe that positive regard would ever occur between Tohru and Akito, you have only to acknowledge that THE MANGA ITSELF proposes peace and new friendship between them, in chapters 120-136 (released in Japan only as of July-November 2006). Don't flame me for sticking to CANON.**

**In this fanfiction, which will be comprised of SEVERAL SHORT CHAPTERS, Akito Sohma's gender is FEMALE, in correspondence with MANGA CANON POST-CHAPTER-98. The story depends HEAVILY on the MANGA as opposed to the anime. **

**This story takes place AFTER THE EVENTS OF CHAPTER 136 OF THE MANGA: Therefore the Sohmas are FREE from the Zodiac Curse and Akito is no longer dying. **

**WARNING: I SHIP CANON ONLY, WHICH MEANS I SHIP SHIGURE X AKITO, TOHRU X KYO, AND KURENO X ARISA. If you do not appreciate these pairings, refrain from reading this fanfiction and do not waste your time flaming me. **

**While I will probably never have time to revise this story, PLEASE ENJOY, R&R! **

Eight months and fifteen days. I no longer have ankles. For all I know, I no longer have feet, as I can't really see them under my belly. Oh well. I keep reminding myself that there is a hope and a promise inside that annoying bulge. A daughter. A fresh start.   
Today, Shigure emerged from his writing cloister in the far upstairs study, his reading glasses askew and fountain pen marks smudged on his cheeks and nose, and boisterously announced that, in two weeks, he and I will sojourn to the hot springs.   
Hatori shortly trailed out behind my enthusiastic husband, an unlit cigarette hanging limply from his lips, and agreed in his typical husky gray voice that it would exact positive effects upon my health and the baby's.  
I snapped at my Dragon that he was no longer cursed and need no longer breathe smoke and fire worthy of the spirit that had possessed him: I would not consent to any medical advice he gave until, like Shigure and Ayame, he showed some intelligence and stopped pumping his body full of nicotine and ash.   
Hatori smirked at me rather affectionately, leaned on the doorframe, and pointed at the disgusting thing hanging from his lips. "Aki-chan, an effort to quit is the very reason why this cigarette isn't burning. Do you think I'd jeopardize my newest little patient?" He nodded down at my stomach.  
I blinked. Oh. Okay. I'm beginning to wonder if there is even a point to trying to boss around any member of my family anymore. They really know more what they're doing than I have ever realized. I'm beginning to even have hope that they care more than I have ever realized, as well. No one has left me yet. Yet.  
Shigure, wrapping an arm around my swelling waist, cackled appreciatively into the interval of my shocked silence (God, in his doting way, he has always loved seeing me taken aback, has always delighted in unseating the Almighty Akito-San for even ten seconds). He tickled my navel and extracted the embarrassingly girlish giggle from me that he craved, a giggle that immediately cracked my authoritarian façade.  
I hate giggling. Laughing is fine, but giggling, God help me, coquettishness makes me gag. I smacked away his hand, blushed, rolled my eyes at their mixture of infantile and loving gestures, and agreed to the trip on the spot.  
I have invited the entire family, the Jyuunishi, and every brother, sister, mother, father, grandparent, and outside friend they may wish to bring. Already Kyo the Cat has accepted and indicated that Tohru, Saki and Arisa, and Yuki's girlfriend of nearly two years, Machi, will be coming as well. Curiously, Shigure's high-strung but attractive young lady editor will also be in attendance. I am far past the point of suspicion that my husband would ever be unfaithful to me—indeed, quite the opposite, sometimes his obsessive devotion to me is bewildering, and I think he would find a way to make the world blow up in a catastrophic mushroom cloud if we were not together after all these years—but I do wonder who else the woman might be eager to see among my clan.   
Perhaps, all questions aside, this is a blessing in disguise, a way to ease towards my family's détente. With a pleasant atmosphere and a slew of beloved outsiders present, it makes it simpler for them to concede to my request without it seeming like a surrender—they are just coming along for the fun and relaxation, and to fellowship with me, why, that is only circumstantial, or so they can claim, right? Yes. It makes it less threatening for them. I hope.  
At any rate, my next chance at making amends with a kinsman, today, did not come at the hotsprings, but at the lakehouse. I accompanied Shigure there so that he could have both my unobtrusive company and some quiet space to compose the conclusion of his new novel. The very editor in question was to arrive at five o'clock and collect said conclusion. It's the very beginning of winter break for the schoolkids, only a few weeks till the New Year, and my cousins Ritsu, Hatsuharu, and Isuzu, who each have keys to the lakehouse, also happened to be passing the chilly, still December afternoon there.   
They were all lounging in the kitchen drinking green and lemon tea, its tangy steaming aroma overpowering my husband and I as we trudged in from the snow. Their eyes fell indifferently and comfortably on Shigure, then snapped over my bundled, pregnant, and once quite dangerous form. I tried to smile. I even waved. I felt what Arisa, in one of her more cantankerous states, usually calls "corny."   
"W'ssup, Mama-in-Progress?" Hatsuharu inclined his two toned black and white spiky head at me, quoting Momiji's kindly teasing title. He smiled coolly and benevolently, gray eyes twinkling.  
I felt my shoulders relaxing, and my smile broadened. "Nothing new," I replied, barely above a whisper. As often these days, an odd shyness crept over me. I felt myself going pigeon-toed and corrected my transparent expression of insecurity as quickly as I could. Even though, again, I cannot even see my toes these days.  
Ritsu, his eyes gaping brown pools, sporadically waved at me and said nothing. He uttered a nervous laugh.  
"Hi, Ritsu." I bowed to him just slightly, conceding equality between us, trying to calm him.  
Isuzu, the Horse, who had frozen like a tightly corralled wild stallion, stirred. She snorted loudly and shoved her long-nailed hands on her hips.  
Hatsuharu murmured something pacifying in her direction, but she didn't seem to hear.  
My eyes fell on her. I suddenly couldn't hear over the deafening race of my heart. Here was someone who would take a lot of thawing, whom I had particularly wounded in the past. Almost a year ago, Tohru gently told me, when I had expressed my dismay that Isuzu constantly avoided me, that my Horse had said she, unlike the other Jyuunishi, had pledged to "never forgive me." As far as I knew today, this was still Isuzu's sentiment.   
She has the blackest and sleekest of hair, the palest and most heart shaped of faces, the straightest of noses, the darkest of eyes. She looks so much like my mother, beautiful but hateful. Even now, it caused irrational hotspots of rage and revulsion to course through me. Even though I knew how much unlike my mother Isuzu was. Just like me. Not like Ren at all.  
But old feelings die as hard as old habits, and I knew she could see the ambivalence and hesitation etched in my features, and that she misread them not as apprehension but as disgust and an attempt to conceal it. She stood, explosively flung her teaspoon into the sink, and stormed outside.   
Shigure had that weird unsettling smile on his face, what I call his "pissed-off smile," because even when he is livid he seems to effect a jolly demeanor. I could just feel him wanting to speak up in a decisive and caustic fashion at Isuzu's black-clad back. So I seized his hand and squeezed it. And he remained silent.   
I did not see Isuzu—or Rin, as many of us call her, though I have not been afforded the privilege of that kind of familiarity with her as of yet—for the remainder of the day.  
But Hatsuharu, who is deeply in love with Rin, saw my gesture, and he nodded at me again, in approval. That at least was something.  
A few hours passed, and my other two cousins vanished outside as well. While Shigure holed himself up in the room by the kitchen, I took his cell phone, placed it in the pocket of my oversize gray sweatpants, and lumbered out for a sight of the frozen lake surface.  
It was there that I found Ritsu by himself, rather agitatedly building a very ice-encased sandcastle, his long ginger red hair pulled back into a neat, cascading queue that I would have expected more to see on Yuki's couture-crazed older brother Ayame. And the activity….it seemed like a peculiar thing to do in this weather, and alone, something that someone very nervous and very lonely might do. And so it struck a chord with me. I paused by his shoulder. "Ritsu?"  
He gave a great gasp, jumped back, and accidentally smacked me on the leg. It hit a pressure point in my knee and I began to fall. I yelped, flailed around desperately, and righted myself. Then I stumbled onto the highest gothic spire of his sandcastle and began tripping around again.  
"OH MY GOD!" Ritsu screamed—shriller and louder than I could ever aspire—jerked to his feet and grabbed my arms, helping me retain equilibrium.   
"…That was close." I laughed shakily.  
Ritsu's lips quivered. For a horrifying moment I thought he might cry….no, it was…worse. What proceeded from those tremulous lips could only liberally be described as coherent. "I'm so sorry oh I'm so sorry Akito-San oh God smite me dead make my blood stop pumping oh God I'm so sorry it's my fault that you almost fell I was building this sandcastle you see I was bored and Hatsuharu told me that I had artistic potential because I'm so sensitive and Oh GOD OH GOD I AM SO SORRY IF YOU MISCARRY IT WILL BE ALL MY F—"  
"RITSU!" I roared it. The word "miscarry" was something I could not abide to hear. And at any rate the sound of a dying seagull incessantly screeching was not really an ideal influence upon my already shredded nerves.  
My Monkey whimpered, clutched his head, and began to rock back and forth in the sand, getting his trousers wet. I think I heard him whispering "nooooooo" in a dramatic and tremulous voice.  
I tapped my fingernails together and focused my eyes on the horizon. Breathing. Breathing. Yes. Remaining calm and judicious. Yes. Breathing.  
Ah. Anyway. "Ritsu, I am going to demand that you do me a favor."  
Nutmeg-colored eyes lifted to gaze at me with something laughably like horror and rapture. I forced myself not to even crack a smile. He could not help being so…eccentric. "Anything, dear mistress," he breathed.  
Yes, it was most difficult to not laugh. The poor boy, he'd fulfilled his fears of his own bumbling clownishness. A bit of self-confidence, that was what he needed, and what I would instill in him.  
"Do NOT apologize me even one more time for the rest of the day."  
Confusion twisted his features. His nose wrinkled. The thought must be utterly alien to him. He cocked his head. "A—all day?"  
"Yes," I said. "ALL day. Take a stroll with me, will you?" Without realizing it, I had reassumed my lowest-pitched, authoritarian rumble, that threatening sound of electromagnetic charge running amok in the thickening air before a thunderstorm. I caught myself, cringed, and added, "You don't have to, but I would really like it if you did."  
Ritsu bit his lip. He sighed out of the corner of his tight mouth and stood. "Yes, Akito-San." He offered me his arm.  
I was charmed. Under the scatter-brained and neurotic façade, Ritsu was a gentleman. I took the proffered limb and squeezed it between my fingers, allowing myself to smile broadly up into his timid face. "Well, Ritsu, how kind of you. Shall we?"  
He turned chalky at my touch and could not restrain a frantic giggle. "Erm, yes, ma'am. I mean you're welcome…I'm sor...rowful…that all the flowers are dying…" A sheen of sweat formed on his cheeks and jaw as he glanced at the barren landscape that had helped him, in his mind, conceal his mild trespass of my solitary request.  
"It's okay," I found myself crooning, "because you know, old habits are hard to break. We can break them together, Ritsu."  
Another mildly manic giggle. "Well, I…thank you for your graciousness, Akito-San."  
I eyed him sidelong, setting our pace at a slow lumber, away from the lake and into the woods. "Not graciousness. Simple fairness. I have made many mistakes. I would be a hypocrite to now judge you too harshly for your own troublesome habits. You need to realize you have value, Ritsu. When that is achieved, I really think you are equipped to do as many great things as any other member of the Sohma Clan. I realize your mother Mesho…is slightly…ah…enthusiastic…when it comes to ensuring that she and hers have been pardoned for what she perceives to be shortcomings…but perhaps my bathhouse mistress, and you, are too hard on yourselves."   
Ritsu's cheeks had long since acquired the faint pink stains of shame. He was staring at his feet, doubtless fearful that his next error would be some tangible rock or tree stump that would actually cause me to stumble and fall this time around. "Many times I've been called a good for nothing, a strange man, a man who seeks refuge in a woman's dress…"  
"Yes," I smiled coldly at the horizon, with an arctic contempt for a person far removed from the lake house. A person with oil slick hair. "Yes, it is a mountainous challenge, isn't it, to feel you have no choice as to the sex, the gender, that you masquerade, when you also feel that something about that role doesn't quite fit."  
He stopped altogether, turned, gazed right at me. Point blank. I almost gasped. He spoke. "I have never been certain…about…you know. Never really certain."  
I wasn't precisely sure what he was getting at, but I had a vague idea. I am slightly different from Ritsu, even though I also once dressed "in drag," as the slang goes. I have always craved men, and only men. While parading as a man, or as a woman, for me that had never changed—only a man's touch could arouse my desires. But I realized what Ritsu was embarrassedly admitting to his Head of House, offering his head to the chopping block—explaining that he felt like a misfit in his own skin and was confused with his own desires. He was uncertain as to whether those ambivalences derived from real preference, or from fear and confusion.   
"Ah…So. You have wanted for men before?" I simply asked it. My face blank, indifferent in a compassionate, unthreatening way, or at least I hoped. Accepting. I would not judge my family. I would only love. From now on. That is my goal. From now on.   
"No, no, I…Hatsuharu, and …and Yuki…maybe once…"  
"Yes, I know, nothing really happened, because Yuki did not reciprocate, and it was many years ago, but I know."  
"How are you and …and Yuki...?"  
"We will mend, step by step." I collected my patience to me, for this question hit at my own securities over the family members whom I had especially wounded. Yuki was among them. Yuki, whom I had drowned in blackness, many, many times.  
"Oh, oh okay good…And you…don't care? You're…not upset? About…Hatsuharu and…?"  
We were standing on a promontory, and by now the sun had set the sky on pink-amber fire. It reminded me of the day, less than three years ago, that Tohru had changed everything, had offered her hand to me in friendship, had rebirthed me. "It is no longer my agenda to keep members of my family from loving one another deeply, in any way, Ritsu." Now I, too, gazed downward. The fall would be perilous, with one false step. "In time, you will all come to realize that….but I wish to continue talking about you….what is it you want, then?"  
"I…I don't know, you see. I don't think any kind of identity is so…so clear-cut, you know, Akito-San?"  
Did I ever. "Mmm hmm."  
Ritsu kept talking, his voice slowly ceasing its quaking, growing firmer. "…I don't know. All I know is I like to look and dress like a woman, and yet I think I may be deeply in love with a woman, Akito-San. Deeply." His fingers wriggled like squeamish earthworms on a fisher's hook.  
I found myself beaming. "Oh? Tell!" My cheeks burned, for I suddenly felt like a bubbling teenage girl gossiping on a cell phone. But I left it, for it had been spoken already, and Ritsu seemed to delight in my reaction.  
He clapped his hands together, a peculiar squeal curling out from his pursed lips. I tried not to appear too wobbly at his sudden reaction, so as to avoid another of his frenzied apologies. "Well you know Mitchan? Shigure-San's editor? She and I have been…erm…well…you know…sort of seeing each other…for a while now. When my curse was…was broken, it was she who was on my mind…my…my honey…"  
I gawked. His "honey!" Suddenly the mysterious presence of my husband's employer became crystal. "You're kidding me!" Oh damn. That was neither eloquent nor supportive.  
Ritsu offered a mortified smile and kicked a pebble off the promontory. "It's alright, I know I don't seem the fetching type…"  
"Actually," I hastened to reassure him, "yours is a match I could see as quite suiting. You both are so…ah…passionate…and…with very little need of inspiration!"  
Or provocation.   
But diplomacy is a virtue, it really is sometimes, when it comes to sensitive family members.   
"…Really?"  
See?  
"Yes, really!" I squeezed his arm again. "You two, you have my blessing. I am so happy for you." I heard Tohru's mantra, "I'm so happy!", echoing in my words. It made me smile softly.  
The baby kicked.  
Ritsu's chest bridled. "Why…why thank you!"  
"Of course…" I frowned. "Speaking of Hatsuharu, where is he?"  
"Well…he…he was with me, my sandcastle was his initial design, you see…"  
At this I received a vivid mental picture of Hatsuharu drawing a meticulous architect's diagram of a sandcastle, floor by floor, with a stick of driftwood, in the sand before Ritsu's eyes, dazzling his timid older cousin, and most likely furnishing him with a project that might bolster his confidence. I chuckled. Hatsuharu was perhaps the keenest of my cousins, in subtle and exceptionally kind ways, when the gentler side of his personality dominated. I had been so wrong to call him the "big, dumb ox." "He got bored, then?" I murmured aloud.  
Ritsu shifted weight in thought. "Well no, but then he said he wanted to do some hiking, so he came up here…I…I suspect he got…"  
"Lost again," I groaned. "I see. Perhaps, Ritsu, with your more nimble physique," I indicated my stomach, "you might help me to locate him before it gets pitch black out here?"   
"Or before Ha'ru himself goes black!" Again Ritsu issued his slightly neurotic giggle.  
I nodded appreciatively. I think perhaps the one time I actually feared a member of my family, aside my own mother, was the time I had been woefully cruel to Isuzu, and Hatsuharu had discovered her in the aftermath, chained to a post in a far back room of my house and refusing the food I had given her. The hole in the wall he made just to the right of my face with his fist could certainly have been my skull, had he even a grain less mercy while so enraged. I am not sure he is as "split" between black and white as the family perceives.   
Although sometimes I wish he HAD struck me, for my crime. I think I always will wish he had. In some ways, my family has been far too kind to me. "Yes, well, I am afraid you have a salient point there, as well. Could you take to a tree—a sturdy one, please, I don't want you injured—and scout the area? I'll rummage around the ground."  
"Of course…A-Akito-san, are you alright? You seem…sad…all of a sudden."  
I cloaked myself in soft indifference again. I hated making any of them worry for me. "I'm fine. Just thinking on …some cruelties of mine…regretting them." I began to waddle in the direction of large careless footprints which I was certain belonged to Hatsuharu.  
"You were never cruel to me," Ritsu persisted quietly behind me, while scrambling with some difficulty up the nearest tree. He gave a sweet little shrug mid-climb.  
I sighed and turned. "You were lucky, Ritsu." And with that I continued, at a deliberately slow pace, hoping Ritsu would notice the footprints, for I had hatched a minor plot to bolster his self-confidence and locate my wayward bovine cousin in one fell swoop. I glanced over my shoulder. Ritsu was looking in entirely the wrong direction, back toward the lakehouse. Well, alright. I was no Shigure, but I could still machinate this.   
Calmly, I stepped in one of the footprints, drew a deep breath, glanced back at his slightly clueless figure once more, and faked a startled squeal. Well, it sounded more like the yelp of a wildcat getting its ass burned, but it exacted the reaction I desired: Ritsu made a startled sound, jumped down from the tree, and rushed over.  
"Are you alright?!"  
"Yes, I think so." I made quite a show of looking downward at the impression in the earth. "What on earth could THIS be?" I felt like an adult leading a color-blind child on an acidic-hued Easter egg hunt.  
Ritsu stared at my foot. I continued to breathe deeply. Several moments passed. Finally he gasped. "It looks like a footprint! A sort of….Goth boots footprint!"  
Brilliant.   
"Why, Ritsu, you're right, and whose might it be?"  
"…Oh my GOD! HATSUHARU! ARE YOU DEAD?! SPEAK TO ME!" And my Monkey tore off, arms flailing like sausage strings, in the direction of the footprints of my Ox.   
Success. I sighed, smiled, and lumbered along behind him.  
I rounded a mossy amalgam of gray rocks and discovered Ritsu having bodily embraced Hatsuharu, who was seated on a boulder and currently appeared thoroughly alarmed. I barked a short laugh. "Well done, Ritsu!"  
Hatsuharu patted Ritsu on the back and wriggled free of his grasp, cocking a bemused eyebrow at me. He bent over and retrieved a fat novel in which he had apparently been engrossed before Ritsu assaulted him. "Heya Ritsu, Mama-in-Progress. I was just around the corner the whole time, heard your voices going on about…something. Sorry, woulda hollered atcha if I'd been paying attention to what you were saying. Didn't know anyone was, you know, worried. Guess I was kinda hopelessly lost, though. Gotta say."  
I gazed sharply into his mellow gray eyes. They flickered as though communicating something that didn't quite fit his claim. Oh, Hatsuharu had an excellent attention span, and rumors of his retarded sense of direction were exaggerated. Highly.  
My smart, perceptive, kind-spirited Ox. I mouthed a "thank you" at him. He nodded.  
Ritsu was hugging himself, his smile illuminating his whole face, trying to conceal his pride at having discovered his "hopelessly lost" cousin. "I'll, um, go inside now," he babbled, with yet another lilting little giggle, walking in a giddy, wobbly ellipse around us. "Cold and and stuff, you stick with Akito-San, Ha'ru, we don't want you lost to hypothermia! Oh I didn't mean to sound harsh, I'm sor—surprised at my boldness! Well, are you two coming?"  
I blinked. "Er yes, it is chilly." Damn my pigeon toes, I corrected them again.  
"Guess so." Hatsuharu stood, slung an arm around my shoulders, and ushered me in Ritsu's meandering downward direction. I dared to lean my head against his shoulder. He let it stay there, and inwardly, I thanked him again.  
"Whadja do, tell him to stop being sorry all the time?" my Ox mumbled.  
I chuckled conspiratorially and nodded.  
"Not bad, Head-Lady." I could hear the grin in Hatsuharu's lulling voice. "Heard about you going to Momiji's parent-teacher conference last week, too. And his violin recital the other day. Haven't seen him so happy in months. I mean I know he grins but. You know. REAL happy, yeah? Anyway. Yeah and that weird-ass word you call him, 'leeb-hhkin' or something. Sweet, Gonna-Mama-San. You're way different. All that talk of doing better by us, when the curse broke, a couple years ago…It wasn't hot air, I guess."  
"You give my heart joy when you say such things, Hatsuharu." My throat felt strangely thick all of a sudden. "I am trying."  
"Yeah, way. I think it's cause you got away from Her. You know. Your mom and all? I guess she said something to you about uhm. Kicking you out or something if Tohru won us all over and stuff? Bullshit, that was kinda poisonous of her. No one's kicking anyone out."  
I drew a shaky breath. "Maybe."  
Hatsuharu stopped walking, and tapped the side of my cheek with his fingers. "Hey. Listen, Mama-San. NO ONE. Is kicking ANYONE. Out. Got it?"  
I looked up at him. I felt, once more, overpowered by that alien feeling of shyness. There was hardly any emotion on his face—Ha'ru always seemed slightly, pleasantly stoned, in a benevolent haze. It was just his nature. "Were you ever afraid of me?" I breathed, with a wondering gulp.  
He shrugged. "Nah. Not of you. Of what you could do, maybe, once, back when it didn't matter to you what the consequences were. But not of you. You were never God. You're just a scared girl with lots of potential. A scared girl that I'd follow anywhere, Akito, the way you've been these days."   
"…I like that." I wrapped my arms around his waist and squeezed, then let go. "Don't be afraid of anything anymore, Hatsuharu. I won't be either, not if you are all here to help me."  
"Deal. Let's get you some cocoa." He slid the back door open and followed me inside.  
I felt a need blossoming inside me, making the baby restless again. I pressed a hand to my stomach and sat pensively on the couch. Ha'ru. I would repay him for this. I would make him see his keen wit. Yuki had once pointed out to him that he was no idiot. I would reiterate the point, somehow, tonight.  
"I DETEST MY CRUEL AND FLIGHTY WRITING MUSE!" My husband emerged from his study in a burst of dismayed enthusiasm, and a yelping Ritsu, who had entered before us, narrowly evaded a smack in the face with the much-abused legal pad that Shigure was swinging around. "Oh, sorry," my beloved Dog gawped, blinked, then bellowed one of his calculatedly charming and whimsical laughs. He pranced, yes pranced, over to me, actually managed to pick me up, and kissed me while my feet dangled. "Enjoy your stroll, Aki-ko, my goddess, my other self?"  
"Oh stop." I hate it when I blush. I hate it even more that he knows how to make me grin at him like a doting idiot. "Put me down."  
"No!" He cackled again. "You should have seen me when I was in high spirits, an hour ago, on my eighteenth paragraph—I would have tossed you up in the air and caught you, I think!"  
There was probably some truth to this claim. I resigned myself to this loving degradation, even swung my legs as he held me up in the air. "Fine, fine. But what is the matter now? Ha'ru is making me cocoa and you are detaining me."   
"I want some too!" was Shigure's immensely intelligent and loudly warbled reply. He batted well-practiced brown eyelashes at the kitchen, into which Hatsuharu had vanished.  
"No…darling, you're missing the point…"  
"Nothing in life is more important than chocolate, my love."  
I sighed. "Yes, well…"  
"Not a problem, Mama-San," Ha'ru's calmly amused voice floated in from the stove, where the clink and clatter of an additional coffee mug accompanied his appraisal.   
"That's very sweet of you," I added weakly.   
"Sweeter than chocolate!" sang Shigure.  
"Yeah, I'm a sweet guy." I think I heard a chortle following that declaration.  
"What exactly ails you, Gure-ko?" I muttered, as my husband finally put me back down on the couch.  
He crawled over next to me, put his head in my lap, and displayed a wildly scrawled upon page near the end of the yellow legal pad. "I am looking for a synonym for this word and am helplessly lost."  
Helplessly lost. I almost laughed at the reiteration of Ha'ru's kind lie. Ha'ru. Wait. Of course!  
Before speaking, I drilled my eyes into my husband's, conveying an agenda that I was about to execute—commanding him to follow my lead. It was not the first time such an exchange had occurred between us, and so the one who knew me better than any other member of my family smiled furtively up at me and nodded. He loved a good game. I wanted to mend my family of my own wrongdoings. We were a good match.   
Then I spoke. "I think I know who can help you. All he ever does is read, after all. Hatsuharu. Hatsuharu? My dear bookworm! Could you come help us?"  
"Shhheeyoorrr…" Ha'ru sauntered back into the room, holding three mugs of cocoa. "I've been accused of worse things than bookwormery, after all." He set my mug down on the coffee table, placed Shigure's on his reclined stomach, and took a slurp from his own. "Oughtta ring my house, though, after this. It's dark enough that I'll probably just spend the night here. What with my tendency to get lost." He winked at me.  
I smiled back. "Well, it's just this—Gure-ko seems to have hit a roadblock with a word."  
"A word?"  
"A most vexing and displeasing word, a word to end all words," Shigure murmured around his mug, waving the page at Ha'ru. His eyes then slid over towards mine, surreptitiously seeking his next cue.  
I nodded so slightly that it could be taken as accidental. "What was it that you were reading, with that voracious mind of yours, Ha'ru?"  
"War and Peace," my Ox supplied, smiling strangely at me. "Tolstoy. Russian dude." He was probably on to me, but I didn't care. I still had a point to make.   
"War and Peace. No light read. I should think you more than capable of helping my husband find a synonym for this damned word. It is beyond my skill, though I am no fool."   
"Yes, please." Shigure stretched, wriggling his toes and fingers, marvelously feigning disinterest. God, sometimes I loved him so much I could not see straight. "If you can, I mean. If it's no trouble…"  
"No, not at all." Ha'ru's eyes had a slate fire in them now, and he pored over the page. "The word is…beggar?"  
Shigure nodded. "My heroic and persecuted protagonist! I've used the word beggar three times already in that paragraph, and it simply feels redundant."  
Ha'ru bit the inside of his lip, then traced his mouth with his tongue. He scowled. "Well. How about 'mendicant'? You know, kinda like those medieval European friars that went around begging for alms when the social climate of Italy got all wonkey in the 1300's."  
The word was perfect, but Shigure pretended to deliberate. He tossed his head back and forth consideringly in my lap. He addressed my stomach. "What do you think, baby?"  
To my astonishment, the child kicked again. I gasped and then chuckled.  
"Yeah, me too." Shigure gave a scholarly nod. "Ha'ru, I like it." He took his pen and scribbled down the alternate noun. "Your thirst for knowledge has obviously paid off, young grasshopper!"  
"Ox," Ha'ru corrected him, smirking, however, at me. Fixedly. "Big, dumb ox."  
I shook my head fiercely. "Anything but those things, Hatsuharu. You are brilliant. No one has the right to call you otherwise." My stupid voice caught in my throat with sudden hormonal emotion, and I sniffled.  
He blinked, then something about the smirk softened. "Kay, Mama-San." He leaned in and kissed my cheek, making me flush. "You're gonna rock out loud as a mom."  
"Course she is!" Ah Shigure. He sounded so smug. I just adored him.  
The sound of a disgusted scoff ruptured the tender and triumphant moment. I looked up, and saw Isuzu, decked all in her desolate black, sneering at us in the doorway. She turned to Hatsuharu, shrugged almost coaxingly, and disappeared down the hallway towards the front door.  
A sour note. I winced.  
"I guess maybe I should go, after all," Ha'ru gently suggested, leaning back. Away from me.  
"Of course." Why did I suddenly feel so daunted? "Don't let her walk home alone, alright? You go on."  
He nodded, saluted Shigure and me, and stood. "Give it time," he breathed, winking at me again. "You're doing great."  
"Yeah," was all I could muster, somehow. Shigure sat up and embraced me. He always knew.  
"Righty-roo. Bye, then, all. Tomorrow's another day. Seeya Ritsu." Ha'ru waved at my Monkey, who was passing through with a TV dinner, and who waved back, mouth full, smiling. At least someone was.  
And then he left.  
And then the wholeness of emptiness, the weight of trial, really struck me. Somehow I knew that the road of redemption would grow far, far more difficult, from now on.  
Pray for me tonight, reader.


	5. My Horse's Forgiveness

Not My Mother's Hair:

A Series of Vignettes from the Diary of Akito Sohma

A Fruits Basket/Furuba Fanfiction by Amber Stitt

**DISCLAIMER:** **WARNING, MANGA SPOILERS AFTER CHAPTER 98 IN THE DISCLAIMER! "Fruits Basket/Furuba" in its anime and manga formats are the creation and property of Takaya Natsuki and I in NO WAY claim ownership or profit thereof.**

**RATED PG FOR SWEARING AND MATURE THEMES (DEATH, CHILDHOOD TRAUMA). **

**This story explores Akito Sohma's change-of-heart in the manga and her subsequent possible attempts to make amends with various family members. It is told from Akito's POV. If you still dislike her even after the manga brilliantly illustrates her personal pains and makes her a sympathetic character, take your cold heart elsewhere and don't bother to read this story, LOL. **

**If you do not believe that positive regard would ever occur between Tohru and Akito, you have only to acknowledge that THE MANGA ITSELF proposes peace and new friendship between them, in chapters 120-136 (released in Japan only as of July-November 2006). Don't flame me for sticking to CANON.**

**In this fanfiction, which will be comprised of SEVERAL SHORT CHAPTERS, Akito Sohma's gender is FEMALE, in correspondence with MANGA CANON POST-CHAPTER-98. The story depends HEAVILY on the MANGA as opposed to the anime. **

**This story takes place AFTER THE EVENTS OF CHAPTER 136 OF THE MANGA: Therefore the Sohmas are FREE from the Zodiac Curse and Akito is no longer dying. **

**WARNING: I SHIP CANON ONLY, WHICH MEANS I SHIP SHIGURE X AKITO, TOHRU X KYO, AND KURENO X ARISA. If you do not appreciate these pairings, refrain from reading this fanfiction and do not waste your time flaming me. **

**While I will probably never have time to revise this story, PLEASE ENJOY, R&R! **

Chapter 5: My Horse's Forgiveness 

Nearly a week, now, at the Sohma family bathhouse and hotsprings, with every member of my family and several guests in attendance, and Ritsu's poor mother having perennial fits. A loud, chaotic place with breaking dishes, quarrels over turns in the men's and women's baths, and terrycloth robes flung in the hallways, on lockers, on chairs, and other haphazard places. Yet we are together and that is something remarkable.

There is an added treat: Tohru Honda and my cousin Kyo have been traveling the world together for the past year and a half but have returned early from their two-year timeframe after catching wind of my pregnancy. Truly, this is the first time in ages that I have seen them both for more than a few hours' visit every two months, between airplanes. I can tell that Kazuma, Kyo's adoptive father, is overjoyed to see his child having gained a sense of purpose and belonging for the first time in his entire life.

Last night, assisted by hand-squeezings and "go on's" from Shigure, I managed to admit to the love of Kyo's life that I would like to name my daughter after her mother, Kyoko Honda. Who better to serve as the namesake of a child of redemption and new beginnings than the mother of the girl who single-handedly saved my family? I all but begged her permission, bowed as deeply as I could in this pregnant state, and waited.

Tohru went very still, her gentle eyes blank, and then she collapsed forward in front of me as though fainting.

Well. Shit. Shigure giggled, and Tohru's lifelong friends Arisa and Saki, who were present, and who had known Kyoko well, crooned in unison, but…For a moment I thought I had killed my dear Honda-San.

Still slumped before me, Tohru shook her head and wrung her hands. I gasped and reached for her, mortified by my grossly inappropriate request. I tried to stammer an apology. In the background, Saki murmured something about a "Red Butterfly," "our A-Chan," and "new bursting cocoons." I gulped, unsure as to what this cryptic stuff denoted.

But just as I attempted to pull Tohru out of her hunched position, she burst to life, reared up with that ludicrously ecstatic face of hers (a face which, now, I absolutely cherish), and smothered me in an embrace. She pressed her forehead against mine, said "yes," and we laughed and wept together and rocked each other.

Then, arm-in-arm, triumphant, we strode out to the bath especially prepared for guests prone to dizziness, and waded there together talking all night.

I wish I could have known this girl's mother, Kyo's earliest friend, my coming daughter's namesake. What an amazing woman she must have been. They say that Kyoko, too, began her life as a solitary and bitter woman, isolated from her parents—like me. Then she had a daughter, and determined herself to change for the better. And succeeded. In a way, Kyoko Honda has become an inspiration of mine—in my desired conduct towards my own child.

Speaking of the baby….Something else that's remarkable: Eight months, 25 days till my due date. I am terrified and yet elated. And those ankles? Who needs them, I've adapted.

Unfortunately, though…. this Elysia has not lasted out the week. When I arose from bed this morning, and left Shigure to his usual till-noon slumber, I already felt teeming unease. The bedroom was stifling hot from the steam heaters, our mat sticky and uncomfortable, as I peeled myself out from the covers and heaved to my feet. But it was not that I was soaked with sweat as much as a sense of quiet discouragement that loomed over me.

I tried to defy my gloom with a bath. The cool soapy sponge brought goosebumps of tingling relief to my skin as I sat in the water that Ritsu's mother had drawn. After a lingering fifteen minutes, she returned with a cordless phone, bowing deeply to me as she handed it over. The caller was Momiji's mother, who had, with some orchestrations by my hands, been persuaded to drop off my Rabbit's little sister Momo for the remainder of the family's final weekend at the bathhouse.

"Yes, Hatori has been watching all our little ones excellently…no, I absolutely do not believe in leaving Momo-chan near the water without an escort….oh yes, please, we would love to hear her play…." I gingerly repositioned myself in the tub, crossing my free arm over my small breasts—shy, even while alone, painfully modest about revealing skin.

For so many years my mother had preached of what an unextraordinary burden and abomination I was, and even now it is difficult to buck the fear that my insufficiencies are written on the pores of my bare flesh.

"Well you know, Momiji really does love your daughter…yes, the violin lessons certainly have bonded them…I think it is…very telling, yes, that Momo wishes to call Momiji 'big brother.' You know." I sat up forcefully in the tub, cleaving the sudsy water, forgetting my nakedness. One hand gripped the slippery porcelain ledge with authority. "I believe your husband and I need to have a talk soon about your children…no, madam, I don't mean child, I MEAN children, and I think you will find it wise to acknowledge and respect my good judgment in this matter. No. Gertje-san, I don't care how much I look like I swallowed a watermelon, I am still your Head of H—"

A violent crash from the corner of the bathroom caused me to jolt, and drop the phone into the water. I cringed away from the sound of falling objects and glass shards, shielding my chest and stomach.

When I am in a state of feral panic, everything tends to become white hot and blurry before my eyes—and I am told my pupils vanish in these times, as though my emotion has blinded me. Now was such a time. "WHO'S THERE?" I roared.

But when no answer came, when my vision cleared, what I beheld was a tall, slender, silent teenage specter. The girl's unevenly short-cropped ebony hair clinging to her ashen cheeks like black algae to a shipwrecked, sunk ivory statue. Her right hand, nearest me, still clenched in the aftermath of her destructive handiwork: the breaking of the bathroom mirror with another cordless outlet. Slowly, like a carnivore gloating over cornered prey, yet also somehow as terrified as the prey itself, she turned to face me. Her teeth were bared. Her onyx eyes burned as fire in the bottom of a pit. She was fury embodied.

It was Isuzu.

"Funny," she finally spoke, in a high, tight hiss. "Your reflection broke in a thousand pieces. I had thought…I had hoped…that it would make you break in a thousand pieces too." Wearing high and sharp leather boots, she took a step towards me. The glass shards sang a bitter, tinkling minor tune under her heels. "If you weren't as fat as a beached whale with a kid right now, maybe I'd DO it. Maybe I'd cut you up."

My ears hummed. I could feel all of me going icy, except my face, which blazed with the degradation of being threatened while naked and wet. It had been nearly two years since I had felt so powerless. But I realized that I probably deserved it. "Rin…?"

"DON'T CALL ME THAT." She picked up the second phone and flung it over my head with all her might. Its microchipped guts crumbled against the tile wall and fell down on me.

I could not suppress a startled whimper.

"OH GOD, GOD! I HATE YOU SO MUCH, AKITO." Her voice was saturated with suppressed tears. She wheeled around and shook her head as though confounded by her own loathing.

_I hate you Akito._

_God, Akito, I hate you._

_So much. I hate you so much. _

_Ren._

_Me. I hated me too_.

"It's…okay," I breathed, cowering against the tile wall. It was important, I knew, that I let her see me submissive. That I let her hash it out, and harangue me uncensored. I must allow her to hate me if she was to forgive me. Every bone in me ached with remorse. God, guilt turns your stomach inside out and ravages it. It makes a vice descend on your shoulders. Guilt, guilt. "Rin, gomen asai…gomen asai, gomen asai, Rin …I have no excuses…What should I do? I won't ask you to trust me, to say it is alright, I don't even want it to be so easy, but can I do anything to…help? Anything, Rin…plea—"

"Shut up, just PLEASE JUST SHUP UP! SHUT UP or I'll throw glass at you! SHUT UP!" She began to shriek her words, hands over her ears, like an irrevocably wounded child. She was crying. Pitching a tantrum. Reverting to the age at which she, like so many other members of my family, had been cast out by her own parents. "I HATE YOUR CREEPY VOICE, I HATE YOUR FREAKY WEIRD GREEN EYES, YOU'RE A FREAK, YOU'RE A FREAK! I WISH I COULD CUT YOU UP!"

I knew she would never hurt me. Hatsuharu had told me too many stories of her deeply buried but kind spirit.

Yet…She was flattened against the closed door, her back smashed against it, scared and yet bold, petrified of me yet bent on defying and defiling me. Her face was red and contorted as she screamed.

I knew that face, it was just like my own, always how my own looked, whenever I drummed up the courage to confront my mother.

"Don't you get it? Are you STUPID? I don't want your pathetic begging bullshit! I can't believe how they've all bowed down and kissed your ass and hugged you! I can't believe they'd all hide their wounds and forgive you without any kind of trial! This morning I just…at breakfast…I…I said I'd…! Ha'ru told me not to do this! But Ha'ru—he's a forgiving fool! Maybe I'm a bitch, maybe I disappoint him, maybe it disgusts you HOW MAD I STILL AM, BUT I AM! I AM!"

"I…I don't want you to do what _you _don't want to do…" I swallowed, slipping lower in the bathtub. "If you don't want to forgive me just yet, Isuzu-san, I will respect that."

"JUST YET? I NEVER will! This won't last! It's a phase, your biggest con yet! Why are you even bothering? That phone call with the Rabbit's mom! That namagomi, that rotting trash!"

No. A phase? It was not. It was a devotion. "I meant what I said to Gertje, Isuzu-san. I am trying to start doing the things I always should have done for all of you…"

She sneered through her tears. "It's TOO LATE. You might as well have died like you thought you would, back when you were killing us all. It's too late."

_No agh no oh God Rin. Don't say that._ "I want to..I..I want to avoid doing more damage…" The water was now freezing, and….Damn, my throat was tightening. If I cried it might make her angrier still. It might make her think I felt sorry for myself. "…I…I am doing my best…I know it isn't enough…but I don't want to hurt you anymore…."

"There's nothing left in us for you to hurt, Akito!" She hiccupped, wiped angrily at her eyes, paced in circles in front of the bathtub. "Don't make empty overtures! Don't stab us! If you're god, then I hate religion! _If god chops off my hair and laughs at my ulcer, and pushes me out windows and calls me nothing, and ties me to a post in a dark room alone, if god only passes judgment, then I judge her RIGHT BACK. You're DAMNED, Akito."_

"I was never god, Isuzu-san" I breathed. "Never. Just a girl. Ha'ru said so. Just a girl." _A stupid stupid girl._

"If you're the head of this family, then _fuck _this family!"

And that was the end of it. "…Oh, Isuzu-san. I don't…know what else to say…"

"Then why won't you just DISAPPEAR?!"

And as soon as she had materialized, she followed her own demand—slipped through the door, in a chaotic frenzy, her knee banging the side of the sink, and fled down the hallway.

"RIN, wait!" I lurched out of the tub, padding through the bathroom and seizing a terrycloth robe. Hot sharp pains followed by a wet sensation on the bottom of my feet…I looked down and saw that they were sliced open and bleeding from the forgotten shards of glass. Shit. Damn! NO, DAMMIT. I didn't CARE.

I kept walking. I tied that damned robe and waddled after her retreating form, down the servant's entrance hallway. I am sure that in another situation I would have looked absurdly funny. Certainly my Snake Ayame and his fiancée Mine, whom I passed in the hallway necking, merely offered me distracted chuckles, and didn't notice the brownish red trail that followed my feet.

Rin was hunched forward on the back porch, overlooking the springs. I simply collapsed onto my hindside next to her. She stiffened, but didn't move. She had dissolved, again, to bitter tears, face buried in her arms. Her voice quivered with loathing, a throaty monotone. "What?"

She had not yet seen my feet, and I covered them up with the train of the oversized robe, because I didn't want her to bear that guilt—I should have looked where I was going. I always had been careless to look where I was going and who was being hurt. It wasn't Rin's fault. None of it.

"Are you going to hit me now?" she breathed.

My heart shattered like the bathroom mirror. "No," I said, "never again."

"Then why did you follow me out here?"

"Because I won't give up on you ever again, either."

I tried not to flinch when she lifted her face, gazing at me, sparing no contempt through that inky hair, lip curled. "You really make me sick. I think I might throw up on you."

"We must get you a specialist for your ulcer, Rin. I will speak to Hatori about it."

"What do you care? If it kills me, then you won't have anyone talking out against your big stupid self-reformation."

_No, Rin, I won't give up._ "Tohru tells me you like jelly best of all food. I shall have to find some that is especially tasty for you."

"I wonder if your kid will be as nasty and psychotic as you."

_I won't give up_. "Have you ever heard that milk is a common form of ulcer treatment? Because the basal content fights the stomach acid…"

"Or maybe she'll be normal, this 'Kyoko,' and you'll just mess her up the way your mom messed you up. You and that Shigure, that mother-fu—"

"Rin."_ I won't. _"Rin, I'll hold your hair for you when you throw up."

"I think you're exactly like Ren. Exactly, Akito. Just like her, you have this perfect life now, and you don't deserve it."

_No_. "Well I don't think you are anymore. I was stupid."

"You still are. Ha'ru will hold my hair. _I don't NEED you_."

"But I need you—YOU have value to ME."

"_TOO BAD_!" And she was screaming again. "_YOU'RE AN IDIOT IF YOU WANT ME AROUND ANYWAY!_"

I gazed out of the corner of my eye at a tiny gold-haired figure gawking in the doorway. Kisa. Her bell-like little voice timidly rang out. "Rin? What are you doing?"

_Desperation. Please don't tell me it's too late. Please don't call me lost. Please don't call yourself worthless. Hopeless. Please don't._ I kept at it. " Rin, if you want to do…anything, to call me names, _hit_ me—" I seized her hand, and it was a dreadful mistake.

Because Rin arched her back, broke free of me, took my figurative statement for the literal, and struck me so hard across the cheek that brilliant, manic white stars, and then murky blue dots, danced before my eyes. I loudly gasped, biting down on my lip involuntarily, splitting it. She had silenced me. I gazed sidelong at her, clutching my cheek, genuinely terrified. I think I was crying—at any rate, my face had, somehow, become soaked.

Kisa yelped. "Stop it!" She turned on her heel, tiny footsteps thumping down some side hallway.

And finally I knew how it felt to be Rin, looking at me, for the first seventeen years of her life.

My Horse's anger died immediately, and her face twisted in horror. She covered her mouth, stifling a strangled little scream, stood, and tried to run from me again.

Rin got three paces before she collapsed into a fetal heap, clutching her stomach as though it housed a roiling hornet's nest.

It was my turn to scream. The windowsills shuddered with it. Kisa, suddenly, was at my side hugging me like a buoy in deep water, and then the lavender-scented Mine materialized, crouching over me and hugging my neck. I simply buckled then and there, sobbing. I am such an emotional, obsessive fool. I had pushed Rin too far, again, even in kindness. It was truly hopeless.

I became aware of Shigure's warm breath on my cheek and his soothing voice in my ear; the girls had moved aside and he was holding me. "I went to the bathroom for a pee," he murmured, in that lovingly wry, consoling tone, "and saw. She's just really angry and scared at things, Aki-ko."

I blinked, burrowing against my husband, and watched Hatori and Ayame lifting Rin upright together. "Carry her in to a bed, I'll give her a shot of Phenergan and Valium in a moment," my Dragon commanded my Snake, brow harshly furrowed. Aaya, in one of those rare, somberly attentive states, nodded, tossed his waterfall of white-silver hair, and hoisted a very pale and unconscious Rin into his arms. I wanted to ask if she would be alright, but I could not stop sobbing long enough.

"Her feet, Ha'ri," Shigure muttered.

"I know," Hatori nodded, squatting in front of us and sliding my robe train up enough to investigate my feet.

"God damn it," Shigure softly, fiercely, swore. I felt his muscles tensing. "That girl, I swear by the Dog, I'm gonna—"

"—Do _nothing_," Hatori curtly cut him off, while picking at my soles with his fingers, and a pair of tweezers from his overcoat pocket. Anticipating Shigure's indignant retort, he added, "Now shut up so I can work on this."

My cheeks burned and I jerked bodily each time Hatori's nimble fingers extracted a glass shard. "I..I'm sorry, I just wanted to talk to h-her…I shouldn…she…she got so upset, I…don't worry about me, go to her! Go to HER!"

"Akito, you must settle down at once," Hatori snapped, smacking his wayward green-black hair from his squinting, injured eye. God, the eye I had injured. "Rin will be alright. This mess, however, will take me several hours to rectify. I will have to get out all the pieces, disinfect it, flush it, and bandage it. Mine, go clean up that damned bathroom floor, carefully. Kisa—get my bag, please, first floor, room 4D."

Both girls scrambled to his bidding, and the sight of their disappearing forms was the last I experienced before giving in to exhausted, fitful sleep.

I awoke in my bed with my feet heavily bandaged. I could make out a slumbering Shigure, slouched forward in a chair in the shadow by the door. Then I glanced to my right and spotted a familiar white and black, scruffy head lying on the floor next to my mat. Hatsuharu. He was twirling a small, elastic object in his black-nailed fingers. He glanced sleepily over at me and proffered a lazy smile. "Heyyyy Little Momma. Good to see ya conscious."

Shigure snorted awake, sat up, and straightened his glasses.

My eyes stung immediately. How was it that I had come to matter so much to these incredible people? "Ha'ru, how is she?"

My Ox's face subtly changed from politeness to something more sincere.

"She's fine!" A sweet female voice interjected, and suddenly Tohru Honda's fruity shampoo scented chestnut hair swept in my face as she softly embraced me. "I promise, Aki-Chan! But how are you?"

WHO CARES? "I'm..I think Ha'ri gave me painkillers, I'll be alright, but really, where is Rin? Did the ulcer attack worsen? Where is she?"

"That's what I'm here to tell ya." Ha'ru sat up and scooted over me. HE exchanged considering glances with Tohru, who was stroking my hair as though she, and not the vicious creature who had, in part, caused all this, were my mother. "Well…"

"She's in bed, too, Aki-Chan," my Rice Ball chirped, "and…"

"And she sent this." Ha'ru brandished the object with which he'd been toying—a skinny, plain elastic hair scrunchy.

My breath caught in my throat. "Oh."

"Yeah," Ha'ru shrugged, "Rin said how you might need something…or did she say someone?…but I think something…to hold back your hair if you hurled?" He chuckled. "Hey, it's logical."

I seized the scrunchy and held it against my chest. There was no way he could understand how much this tiniest of peacable gestures meant to me.

Hope.

Newness.

Possibility.

Maybe someday, even forgiveness.

The baby, my baby, Kyoko, kicked.

"Thank you," I breathed, letting my eyes close again.

Maybe someday.


	6. My Rooster's Purpose

Not My Mother's Hair:

A Series of Vignettes from the Diary of Akito Sohma

A Fruits Basket/Furuba Fanfiction by Amber Stitt

**DISCLAIMER:** **WARNING, MANGA SPOILERS AFTER CHAPTER 98 IN THE DISCLAIMER! "Fruits Basket/Furuba" in its anime and manga formats are the creation and property of Takaya Natsuki and I in NO WAY claim ownership or profit thereof.**

**RATED PG FOR SWEARING AND MATURE THEMES (DEATH, CHILDHOOD TRAUMA). **

**This story explores Akito Sohma's change-of-heart in the manga and her subsequent possible attempts to make amends with various family members. It is told from Akito's POV. If you still dislike her even after the manga brilliantly illustrates her personal pains and makes her a sympathetic character, take your cold heart elsewhere and don't bother to read this story, LOL. **

**If you do not believe that positive regard would ever occur between Tohru and Akito, you have only to acknowledge that THE MANGA ITSELF proposes peace and new friendship between them, in chapters 120-136 (released in Japan only as of July-November 2006). Don't flame me for sticking to CANON.**

**In this fanfiction, which will be comprised of SEVERAL SHORT CHAPTERS, Akito Sohma's gender is FEMALE, in correspondence with MANGA CANON POST-CHAPTER-98. The story depends HEAVILY on the MANGA as opposed to the anime. **

**This story takes place AFTER THE EVENTS OF CHAPTER 136 OF THE MANGA: Therefore the Sohmas are FREE from the Zodiac Curse and Akito is no longer dying. **

**WARNING: I SHIP CANON ONLY, WHICH MEANS I SHIP SHIGURE X AKITO, TOHRU X KYO, AND KURENO X ARISA. If you do not appreciate these pairings, refrain from reading this fanfiction and do not waste your time flaming me. **

**While I will probably never have time to revise this story, PLEASE ENJOY, R&R!**

Chapter 6: My Rooster's Purpose 

The New Year has come and gone. The delivery date is two days away. I am too afraid to sit idly for even one moment. Tohru and Kyo have decided that, while their world travels are far from over, they wish to move their belongings into Shigure's old house in the woods on the far edge of the Sohma Estate grounds. So I have volunteered to help them move in the past several days, however useful I may be in this balloon-like physical state. Kyo, who, I have come to realize, expresses concern for others by behaving as gruffly as possible, has grumpily relegated me to the organization and command of the movers. Today I was handed a penciled-in diagram of the floors and rooms with a list of furniture in each, and was to direct the accurate placement of items. I had the "authoritative presence" necessary to achieve this, Kyo brusquely complimented me, while blushing.

I was also to stay put on a futon in the front hallway while I did my part, or Tohru would worry to the point of sickness.

Tohru chirped that this was not true and that I should not worry about upsetting her when my delivery is so soon.

Tohru did so worry and was fibbing for my benefit, Kyo grumbled something to that extent.

Well. I fixed a jade stare on them both as I prepared to dial the moving company. "I am not used to being ordered around like this." I paused for a dramatic stretch, and the scraping screech of the busy signal pierced the silence.

Kyo's garnet eyes widened. Tohru opened her mouth to apologize.

I burst into a grin and waved a lax wrist at them both. "I am joking," I crooned, with a gentle chuckle that was followed by their chorus of relieved laughter. "I'm sorry, my sense of humor needs fine tuning, evidently…But how about this question: Why are you suddenly moving back in, anyhow?"

"It's more home to me than anything else has been in quite a while, Aki-Chan," Tohru admitted, eyes downcast. "It's where Kyo and I met. If Shigure had not put out those little carved Zodiac animals that day on this very back porch…"

"I know," I breathed. "He has placed them in the baby's room for that very reason. I think he means for them to be a symbol of your lasting presence in our house, even when you are far away…and that is what puzzles me. You were not coming home until next winter. Why now?"

Kyo shifted weight. "Well, just look at you," he grunted, nodding at my belly, with his stunning diplomacy. Note my sarcasm, reader.

But the greater meaning of this remark startled me deeply. "Are you trying to say that…?" I gazed urgently up at Tohru, whose eyes gradually lifted and met my own. My vision blurred, and I was glad for it, because the fondness on her face was almost too much wonder for my cautious, aching heart to bear. Fondness for ME. Amazing.

"We wanted to be here when she's born." The Sohma Rice Ball nodded in affirmation, bent over me, and kissed my forehead. I bowed my head and nodded, eyes closing to corral the flood of tears. Once again I felt as though my young friend was pantomiming the behaviors of a real mother for me, so that I could know that I had experienced maternal love. Because that is something Ren will never give me, and Tohru knows that.

I have begun to forgive my real mother, just slightly. I cannot hope to gain forgiveness if I cannot offer it myself. My voice crept to audibility, shakily. "Shigure once told Kureno that Ren was not evil, but pitiable. Maybe he was right." I looked up at the couple standing like faithful centurions at each side of me.

Tohru nodded and softly tucked one of my bangs behind my ear. My cheeks warmed, and the one closest to her hand leaned into it briefly. I sighed.

Kyo's nose wrinkled. "What brought THAT on? Oh yeah hey, speakin' of Kureno, he's droppin' in to help me lift some heavy boxes. Uotani gave Tohru a ring yesterday, said she'd nag him into lendin' a hand."

My stomach juices curdled in nervousness at this declaration. I had not seen Kureno more than a fleeting time or two, buffered by the presence of many other people, since he had been hospitalized. The hospitalization was because of my final, and most violent, physical tantrum: a knife wound. I had visited his room and made my pleading, anguished apologies—perhaps the first apologies in my life that had ever been sincere. He had accepted them readily.

And then he had disappeared—moved out of his house on Sohma Estate. I saw the cardboard boxes, so few, filled only with the things he absolutely needed, in his hallway weeks before he left. I did not say anything. I did not stop my Rooster from his flight.

I have since befriended his new lover Arisa Uotani, Tohru's longest-standing best friend, and gotten detailed reports of his well-being and activities through her. But I have been too ashamed to seek him out—my Rooster whom I crushed underfoot ever since the child Yuki moved out of the Main House and I made Kureno my new suffocated slave. Kureno who tucked me in every night. Kureno who sang to me in a honeyed tenor when I was so sick or frightened that I thought the walls were going to crush me and the air itself was going to smother me. Kureno who told me stories of Mr. Moon and how the stars conspired to dance in beautiful patterns for children who waved at the sky. Kureno whom I made my lover when I came of age. Who unwittingly forced a rift between Shigure and me, when Shigure saw my womanhood in Kureno's hands as my betrayal of the Dog's all-consuming devotion. Whom Shigure, therefore, still blames as the reason why he slept with my mother and ran from me for so many painfully lost years.

Sweet wise steady shy nurturing Kureno. And now we were to coexist again, perhaps with no buffers between us.

Once again, as so many times lately, I was terrified. "Oh," was all I could muster, with a sickly nod.

"Shigure's stoppin' by to drop off some lunch for us," Kyo added in a carefully formed aside, as though reading my mind. He watched me the way a cat watches a broken-winged canary and isn't sure whether it pities it or wants to devour it.

I jumped. "Oh! Oh." Shit.

"Aki-chan, is something wrong?" Tohru, who had begun to sort out the jeans in one of her suitcases, glanced up at me.

"Absolutely not!" I barked back. I cringed at the fearful widening of her eyes. "It's… fine, Tohru-chan. Don't be frightened for me. Everything's fine." I turned from them in that moment, and swiftly dialed the movers. "I had best get on this." I swallowed the knot in my throat again, waiting until their steps announced their departure from the room, before slumping forward and covering my face. It was only when the man on the other end of the telephone line demanded to know who was there that I returned to the task at hand, and put the thought of Kureno behind me.

I hung up in time to be attacked by the aroma of Styrofoam cupped miso soup, and warm wet kisses against my neck. They suited my Shigure. I shivered and, somehow, as always in his presence, dopily smiled. "Idiot."

"Wife." Each arm, soft but substantial like plush, lunged around my waist, surrounding me in the hunter green raw silk of my husband's habitual kimono. My upper lip was seized between each of his—a flirty nibble, a moist caress, a musky-orange-scented breath of invitation, and finally the inevitable, throaty observation, heralded by a crafty chuckle: "Why, Aki-ko, we're alone." Two warm, soft, but substantial, hands, smelling of ballpoint ink and our lunch's soup and spices, cupped my jaw. "Utterly." Two eyes, a veiled, cool brown which could become a murky gray or a sparkling chocolate

"Not for long, you great silly thing…Shigure, don't you dare…!" The smile in my voice was palpable—there had never been a time when Shigure could not penetrate my formidable defenses and show me for the vulnerable but eagerly human girl I really was. "Get off, I said—ahaha I said get off!"

He was tickling me, while giggling wildly himself, and my affectionate scolding was only goading him on.

This, you see, reader, is how gods are toppled. Tickling. "Get OFF!"

"I don't want to!" he howled, crawling up onto my stool with me and grinning quite fiendishly through his wayward black hair. "I want my wife, and I want her in my old house of ….usually good repute!"

I laughed outright.

Be it known that truly devoted husbands find pregnant wives burningly sexy, reader.

However, the approaching company had me more jittery than…hungry. There was an inexplicable tremor in my voice as I blurted, "Gure-ko, in all seriousness, we can't be seen dissembled in front of Kureno, he's due any minute to help Kyo unpack boxes."

Shigure stiffened, sliding off of me, the billowing of his dark, full sleeves making him look like a stingray in shallow waters. "Why do you think I dropped by, goddess?"

"To help as well…" No. No, wait. My husband conserves effort and energy the way the beady-eyed tax collectors of antiquity conserved gold coins. "Shigure. Even now, you still see him as a threat..?"

"I told you I don't like sharing the things that I cherish. The things, and the people." A cryptic smile curled up his lips. Veils dropped over his eyes, rendering them patient and expressionless. I hate it when he gets this way.

"You are not sharing me with ANYone in the way a husband is with a wife," I spat, the heat of indignation quickly rising in my cheeks. "I am joyfully having your CHILD…she is moving." I pressed his palm against my navel. "Feel? How much more proof can you have than her?"

He became oppressively silent, mouth tightening. As the moments passed, however, he began to stroke the place where the baby had moved. "I'm sorry, Aki, love. A dream once caught is so beautiful as to seem difficult to believe it has finally come true."

Oh Gure-ko. I love him so very consumingly. His flowery speeches, his tickle attacks, his mysterious grin, his silly laughter, and his spicey new-book smell. I once thought to myself how I wanted him to drown in me…how I wanted to become him, and for him to become me…no one would ever know me better.

I rested my hand on his right cheek. A very short time ago, I scratched that cheek in a rage with my bare fingernails, thinking he was going to abandon me—he who I needed most of all. "You need never fear that my love for you is not real."

Silence. He was still smiling—he was always smiling. But this was his real, surprised, doting smile. "Right as usual, my Aki." He scooted a Styrofoam soup cup at me. "Eat, little momma, or whatever it is Hatsuharu calls you. For two!"

Behind us, a throat cleared. I jerked around, guiltily, and met a tall, thin figure with brick brown, impeccably kempt hair and warm, large, gentle terra cotta eyes. The man stood barely five inches from me. He was smiling.

"K-Kureno!" I gulped audibly and tried to reciprocate, standing so suddenly that I teetered and Shigure had to leap up to steady me. I could not see the look on my husband's face, but it did something to encase Kureno's unguardedly compassionate stare in frost. "Akito," was all he said.

A weight bore me down like molasses, boulders and tar, and I bowed my head in shame. How could this possibly work?

"The prodigal returns," Shigure's condescendingly laughing voice sliced the silence like a sterling knife through molasses. I wanted to hush him but I was too embarrassed to look up or even move. "Making yourself useful again, then, Kureno… 'sama'?"

_"Shigure_," I hissed, mustering the gumption to jab him with my elbow.

"I am sorry, Shigure-san, if it ever appeared to you that I was _un_helpful," came my Rooster's impeccably calm and polite reply. He tried to sidestep the conversation Shigure was starting—the subtle irrigation work of jibes, digs, and slights meant to chip away at Kureno's sense of confidence and welcomeness, to then let loose a flood of bitterness if need be. "In fact, I've come to help Kyo lift some boxes, I assume you, too, will be—"

"Oh, I'm sure, great sacrificial lamb, kind and steady Kureno." My husband, a different creature from the big, warm, doting puppy he was five minutes before, paced slowly round his adversary. Shigure is one of the most obsessive, tenacious personalities conceivable. It's not often recognized because he is also a god of passive-aggressive strategy and a master of the easygoing, smiling mask. But in truth, he is the most intense person that I know. "I imagine there are many things you're sorry about, Kureno. Or maybe _regret_ is a better term for it."

"Only _me_?" Kureno was speaking through his teeth, though his melodic, soft voice remained thus. I watched his hands out of the corner of my eye; they were clenching and unclenching, slowly, self-soothingly. I had never known a human being with such self-control in all my life.

Bumbling, thumping gestures rang from the front of the house, proceeded by a feminine yelp of "_Gomen ne_!" I praised my ancestors for the opportunity the noise brought.

"Gure-ko, I think Tohru just came back from the grocery, would you help her…since you're _still _the master of this house?" Though I issued it as a question, it was a command. My lips tightened.

Kureno stepped back from our two embraced forms, drawing a deep breath. His fists unclenched.

My husband appeared to grasp the couched reassurance in this query, but his prickling character was not yet slaked. He shrugged his shoulders and presented a glib grin. "But…but of course!" He kissed my cheek. "Why would I deprive darling Tohru-chan the assistance she deserves? I too can learn from Kureno-sama—"

Kureno stirred. "I do not ask for nor deserve praise such as the title you bestow—"

Shigure shouted, both jubilantly and tauntingly, over him, "Though if the _Honorable Rooster_ doesn't mind—"

"I SAID there is no need for such praise—"

"—AH, now Sensei SHOUTS….Anyway, if Sensei doesn't MIND, then I might refrain from employing his typical manner of clumsiness, as darling Tohru-chan has already admirably emulated him in this respect!" And with this final veiled insult, Shigure deeply bowed to a stiff Kureno, winked at me, and backed out of the room.

I sighed, gazing up into the eyes of the gentle soul who remained. "I'm really very sorry, Kure— "

"I did not come here to hoard apologies, Akito-chan. Let me embrace you…please." He took three broad strides and was towering over me again, as he had so many times in my childhood. A comforting giant of six feet, four inches.

"…I…alright." Oh God.

He slowly and totally engulfed me. I was safe. Totally safe again. The hug lasted three second and thirty years. Still it ended too soon. I adored him and always will.

"It is so good to see you again," he whispered, and I panicked because his eyes were moist. I frowned, jerked back, looked down at my belly and absently touched it, as he added, "you look so grown up and beautiful now, Akito. Arisa has told me all about your progress…and now I see it with my own eyes…when I walked into the room and saw you so happy with Shigure-san…" His words were suddenly cut short by a grunt. He leaned against the near wall, wincing apologetically. "Sometimes this side gets a little weak," he sheepishly concluded. "I left my cane at home…I only need it on rainy days, though, I promise."

Gesturing at his back, and the arm muscles connected.

At his back, where I had….

Where I…

Kureno…I was floundering in guilt again….paralyzed….talk! Don't be paralyzed!

Oh GOD! What to SAY? The first thing that came to mind…it had worked with Kisa-chan, the very first in my family to accept me for real. Say anything!

TALK!

Don't lose him again.

"I…y-you know, speaking…of growing up…I have to cut my nails down to the quick now, don't I? I don't want to scratch the baby. Maybe I wouldn't but …but why risk it for my own vanity?" Well, that sounded sort of cheesy. Why does everything I do and say anymore feel awkward and stupid? I'm thrashing around blindly, it seems. In the right direction, though….

I hope.

He pushed himself off the wall and turned to me abruptly—abrupt gestures, for Kureno, ever gentle and methodical and pensive, are alarming. I jumped back. "WHAT? What's the matter?"

"Oh, Aki-Chan, absolutely nothing." Suddenly he was beaming at me. I have never seen him smile so unguardedly. It was contagious. I breathed a bewildered and self-conscious giggle—yes, a giggle—as he stepped closer, and, once again, tenderly embraced me. "I am so very proud of you, you see. That is all."

I gasped as though I had been doused with cold water. Proud? "What?" My hand ran over the place on his back that had been so easy to reach—to stab with a butcher's knife—only a few short years ago. I stroked that place in his right shoulder blade, wishing I could undo the scar there. "No, you're not. How could you be?"

He did not let go of me. He was such a sweet fool and I cherished him devotedly for it. "You have started over. You have seen past your own pain and childish rage. You have given your hand to others expecting nothing in return. You are not a self-serving girl anymore, Akito, you are a beautiful and brave and giving _woman_. I love you. I am so proud of you. So proud."

Damn. I was weeping. Stupidly. Stupidly, everything I do, stupidly! My giggles became soft sorrowful moans. "Don't flatter me! It is just another form of self service if I know I will benefit from being kind," I choked.

He was stroking my hair. It had always been one of the most soothing feelings of my existence, my guardian, my Kureno's, hands in my hair. "But it isn't. Of course you will benefit—by receiving the love and trust of your family in return for your kindness, you too will thrive, Aki-Chan, and have even more opportunities to do kindness to _others_. You will pay it back _and_ pay it forward."

"Kureno." I hid my face in the crisp fresh linen smell of his shirt. Making water puddles on it. I hoped he would see those puddles as a sign of my affection, and not a stain. "For a recluse, you have become very wise over these years."

He exhaled a quiet laugh. "_Now_ who is doing the flattering?"

"Nobody!" I gazed urgently up into his large, serenely hooded hazel eyes. "You were all but a savior to me ever since my childhood! So gentle and careful with my frailty, yet you didn't treat me like some freak—ever! That I possessively smothered you all that time is unforgivable…e…even if I treated you well! My Rooster in his gilded cage!"

"But Aki-ko, it's entirely forgivable, because I've already forgiven you. And you know that."

Yes, oh yes, yes, I knew that. All too well. Something bestially desperate to give him happiness clawed around in my chest. "Tell me you are happy with Arisa! Out there, beyond these walls! Tell me! Tell me that my neediness doesn't haunt you anymore!"

He was so calm. Stroking my hair again. How could a human being BE so content? "I _am _happy with Arisa. Blissful actually, though she…like Shigure, it seems… accuses me of the same clumsiness that you always found…endearing." He blushed gently and chuckled. "I am not just saying it to give you peace of mind. And Aki-chan…you aren't 'needy' anymore. That is precisely my point. You have grown amazingly. But can you not be gentle with yourself, gentle and patient—can you not allow for fallbacks, and stumbles? Imagine my voice saying these things the next time that you hear Ren deriding you in your head. I am always right here."

REN! A water blossom and a heartless bitch. How did he know that it was she who haunted me?

Kureno had seen the worst side of me. He had discovered Isuzu chained to the cat's room door and starved because of me. He had seen me trying to kill my mother…

My mother? Still that word, applied to that woman…it seemed so hollow.

I felt anything but independent, anything but strong, as I clung to him even more tightly, as my nails nearly pierced his shirt folds. I could not make the tears cease. I could not make it stop. I could not. "I have been trying to give something to …to e-every Jyuunishi these past m-months….to help them to h-heal, but what can I give YOU, who are so blameless? Your curse was broken f-first because of your kindness, Kureno—free, you should ALL be so free—Isuzu—Rin hates me! Rin hates me! Many do, I am sure of it, and rightly! I cherish them! I really…I really LOVE every one of them, so much that it frightens m-me! B-but it will never be fully mended, Kureno! Never! I will never be able to fix them!"

Keep the world at bay. My Rooster with clipped wings. Just once more, hide me, and then, if you must, fly away.

"You have given me what I needed—to BE needed. For a long time, I told Arisa that I should simply disappear from your life—Mr. Moon and the nights watching over you until you slept were gone now, I thought, and I felt purposeless and somehow insufficient, Aki-Chan. But knowing this…seeing you so changed…I see that you may yet be able to…to get over that time…when you mistook me for a traitor, and wounded me…I see that you may be able to accept yourself, and move on…and that I need not keep myself from being part of your life."

"DON'T take back your shackles, Kureno!" I tried to sound harsh. I could not bring myself to shove him away. "If I have to hurt your feelings to protect you, I WILL! If I have to tell you to GO, Kureno, I WILL!"

I was lying. I am still too weak for such a sacrifice as the friendship of my gentle Kureno. I may always be.

He shook his head. "I need purpose alongside my new freedom. I want Arisa to see the kind of man that I can be, someday, for our own family, if she will have me …I need to show her how much I love the people I'm closest to….people like you…one of my dearest friends, always….It is no pain to me to be, at times, by your side, little goddess. I want to be there to see your child grow. I want to remain one of your constants. Please?"

I loudly snorted up the snot in my nose in the teeming silence that ensued. Mortified. "Oh, God."

"Whom you no longer are." I sensed the smile in his dry voice.

"Alright! I need you. I need you too." I could not help myself, I could not. My first love, my guardian. My friend.

"Thank you, then, for giving me happiness." His lips brushed the top of my head.

"I have given you nothing aside my own selfish love."

"It is not selfish, Akito. Real love is never selfish. You have thought of me first by letting me go—even when you believed it would only end in your loss. I have returned now because I recognize how your love has changed…how it has become genuine." And then he read my mind. "You may think you are weak…but you are the strongest person I know."

I had no rebuttal for this. My heart fluttered and my mind writhed with a thousand thoughts. I want to believe him… I would keep trying to do so.

"I want to be a good mother," I breathed. "I don't want to be like HER. I want it to all start over. I want my child to never know the fears and pains that the rest of my family has felt. I want her to be the first that I do NOT hurt."

"You will be nothing like Ren." His tone changed, became steely. "Nothing in the world could convince me otherwise."

"How do you KNOW?" I disengaged from him, raking my fingers through my hair. "Rin said I was just like her."

He smiled. He had a knowing smile, like my Shigure's smile, but not so fiercely determined….rather it was softer, more serene—it would even seem resigned, were it not for the glistening light in his eyes. He sat down on the step, and patted on the floor next to it. I sat cumbersomely, accepting his assistance. Then he spoke, and I felt as if I had been transported to my childhood, to his bedtime stories and lullabies. "There is a story in the Christian Bible about a wise king. His name was Solomon. Two women came to Solomon asking him for advice. Each woman claimed she was the mother of an infant child, and neither was willing to back down. Solomon devised a trick to discern the real mother: He commanded that the child be sliced exactly in half and that each portion be given to each woman—"

"WHAT?" I erupted. I was filled with volcanic rage. "That is BARBARIC! Surely it would be best for one woman to yield, and give the child to the other!"

Kureno's grin broadened. "Congratulations, Akito. That is precisely what the REAL mother suggested. And Solomon gave the child to HER in that instant. It was more important to the real mother that her baby have happiness and safety than that she herself be happy. That is the mark of real love."

Everything went fuzzy and white for an instant. I covered my mouth. "I love you," I murmured through my fingers, buoyed by new hope. I swallowed and removed my hand from my face.

"You are smiling," he beamed.

"Look who is talking!" I tenderly hugged his arm. "Sweet Kureno!"

"…Arisa says that I could 'step in dog crap' and keep smiling." And indeed, he couldn't seem to stop grinning all of a sudden.

I spared a sickly chuckle, sitting upright. "Not that you haven't stepped in a particular dog's crap repeatedly, over the years." I muttered, feeling flushed and glancing out in the direction of Shigure's exit. It was oddly silent in there, suddenly, where he and Tohru were allegedly putting away the groceries.

To my astonishment, my outwardly stoic Kureno loudly laughed. "Yes, well, dear Aki, that wasn't your—"

"Don't finish that sentence." I said it a little desperately, though I was still forcing a feeble smile. "I don't want pardon until it's been earned. With time, it will be. I feel that I should explain my husband, though, now, with a little distance from the fervor that had the three of us in …some sort of...bizarre love triangle…"

He gave another laugh, more flustered, and waved it off. "Oh, Aki, come on…"

"Call it what you will, but he could have been kinder to you…I think I understand why, now."

His eyes hardened slightly and the stony visage, so misleading as to his true gentle nature, had returned. His voice was barely audible. "Aki-Chan, I have always admired Shi-Nii's brilliance and wit, and his determination too, but I DON'T want to hear excuses for the way he hurt you. The way he slept with your mother."

I blinked, faltered, then smiled—somehow, it felt easier now. Perhaps it was because I at last had a chance to do some comforting, instead of my Rooster. "No, that is not exactly my intent."

"Good."

"Good," I echoed him, pensively nodding. I licked my lips and sought the correct phrasing. "Shigure was not…born…as kind a person as you are. He _became_ so…and…Yes…he is my greatest love…and always will be…but there was a reason why I chose you first…I was very fragile, and from the time I was born, it was you who…had the sense that more people existed than yourself, that where you stepped mattered, that you might step ON someone who could break." I sighed and shifted weight, relocating to the stool and wishing for the bean chair that Saki Hanajima's little brother had donated to my house upon "foreseeing" my pregnancy.

"At any rate, I was too young then to realize the capacity of a human being to change—even worse, I was always someone who loudly proclaimed her intentions and sentiments, spoiled, with no consequences, and it never occurred to me that what a person might DO could completely mask his intentions…his feelings. Unfortunately…Gure-Ko highly overestimated my grasp of concealed motives when I was a sick, silly, cruel teenage girl."

"You were alone and afraid." Kureno, squeezing my hand, gave no quarter.

But neither did I. "So was half my family. They were never tempted to behave as I did. It is my own fault what I have done with my misery…I could have used it to be the most empathetic Family Head imaginable…able to understand everyone's sufferings…but instead, simply because my suffering was the greatest, I turned it into some sort of…elite experience…like I was entitled to more simply because I endured more. It was all a defense, really, for being….alone and…afraid, as you put it….but I could have done better by all of you."

Kureno stared stolidly at the floor, knelt faithfully right beside me. He squeezed my hand again. Still he refused to speak ill of me, even if he knew I was right in passing judgment on myself. He waited patiently for me to continue.

"…I really do love you," I mumbled, before proceeding. "Anyway…when I was very little, I asked Shigure if he liked me, because he was always so aloof—aloof, I realized only recently, because he knew it would draw me closer to him, if only in insecure curiosity. Well, when I asked him this question, he gave me a flower and assured me that there was no other person he loved more. I have kept that flower pressed in my diary to this day. Another time he took me into his lap and told me that one day, when I grew up, he would marry me and kiss me all over." I found my breaths quickening. "Kureno, he told me…he told me that until that day came, everything he did, every move he made, every gesture and word, would be to fulfill that goal. And you see, I think he really meant that. And I think that was just the problem. You had many things to look forward to—your singing, your experience of other worlds and women outside these walls—but…my Gure-Ko remained under the Sohma Curse, and transmitted all his hopes and dreams into one single goal: Me. And when I did not see this, and when you replaced Yuki, and became my constant companion, and I saw only you…that one goal and dream was snuffed. And it made him unkind to us both…because…because the only thing for which he lived was denied…and it crushed him."

Kureno scratched his nose, scowling, but made no other noise or movement.

I plunged ahead. "And I do not mean to say it is anyone's fault…not mine, certainly…at least the blame between my husband and myself is equal…But…It was only when I could return to Shigure out of choice, not in sickly, frightened desperation, that happiness came to us both. And he changed, you know, softened. Got less selfish. I didn't feel that loving him would be quite such a pitfall…Hatori has certainly remarked on his improved character."

"Let us hope Hatori is correct. Akito. It's alright. If you love him, and are happy…then the acts of the past belong there." Kureno turned to me and fastened his hazel stare on my own. "If you, like me, are TRULY…happy."

I smiled confidently now. "I am. Even more so, with you coming back to visit. I have missed Arisa too." I allowed myself to giggle again. "She has forced me to wear jeans, and…taught me a very peculiar American game called Twister. Saki was there too. The problem is, Saki was as unfamiliar with the game as I was, and…she had me putting my feet and hands on the white spaces instead of the colored dots."

"Oh, dear." He chuckled.

"Kureno?" My heart swelled again, and I touched his face.

"Mmm?"

"I will teach little Kyoko about Mr. Moon. I will sing her lullabies and sit by her bedside until she sleeps. I will give her what you gave me, Kureno. She will dream of flying as I did. Thank you for our time… together."  
My Rooster's features hunched up and he looked quickly away, for a brief instant. Then he turned back to me. "I will always be here for you, and for her," he pledged.

"No, you won't." A new voice: Shigure's. My husband's arms slid around my waist, his hands resting on my navel. "You polished and preserved my precious pearl while I wandered." His voice was unusually gravelly. "I was not joking when I called you Sensei, Kureno. I have learned…much." That warm, spicy-scented cheek rested against my own, rubbing away my tears. I felt as though Akito the child was now bequeathed from one protector to the next, as Akito the woman. I smiled, along with my Gure-ko, at my Rooster.

"Does this mean I can charge you for lessons?" Kureno asked—while grinning. Wryly.

I laughed, turned, and kissed Shigure deeply in order to tranquilize him of Kureno's witty retort.

"Don't push it, chicken boy," my husband purred. His own cackling laughter spilled out at the end of his feigned threat. "She's ticklish here," he added, wriggling his fingers over my stomach and sides, much to my chagrin.

"_Stop_!" I squealed, in total dearth of dignity

"See?" my husband giggled. Yes, giggled. "Extremely ticklish there!"

"Yes, I kno…er…." Kureno caught himself when I flung him an urgent and wide eyed look. "…Ohhhh, really? Never noticed…"

"Yes, really." Shigure demonstrated again, proudly, and I had the sensation of being stuck between two very proud little boys, while my husband slew me with tickle-induced laughter.

Oh, such bliss in détente. I pray it will last.

"Alright!" I cried, smacking my foolish, wise, beloved one away. "Enough, let us move some boxes and clear some air!"


	7. My Dragon's Heart

Not My Mother's Hair:

A Series of Vignettes from the Diary of Akito Sohma

A Fruits Basket/Furuba Fanfiction by Amber Stitt

**DISCLAIMER:** **WARNING, MANGA SPOILERS AFTER CHAPTER 98 IN THE DISCLAIMER! "Fruits Basket/Furuba" in its anime and manga formats are the creation and property of Takaya Natsuki and I in NO WAY claim ownership or profit thereof.**

**RATED PG FOR SWEARING AND MATURE THEMES (DEATH, CHILDHOOD TRAUMA). **

**This story explores Akito Sohma's change-of-heart in the manga and her subsequent possible attempts to make amends with various family members. It is told from Akito's POV. If you still dislike her even after the manga brilliantly illustrates her personal pains and makes her a sympathetic character, take your cold heart elsewhere and don't bother to read this story, LOL. **

**If you do not believe that positive regard would ever occur between Tohru and Akito, you have only to acknowledge that THE MANGA ITSELF proposes peace and new friendship between them, in chapters 120-130 (released in Japan only as of July 2006). Don't flame me for sticking to CANON.**

**In this fanfiction, which will be comprised of SEVERAL SHORT CHAPTERS, Akito Sohma's gender is FEMALE, in correspondence with MANGA CANON POST-CHAPTER-98. The story depends HEAVILY on the MANGA as opposed to the anime. **

**This story takes place AFTER THE EVENTS OF CHAPTER 131 OF THE MANGA: Therefore the Sohmas are FREE from the Zodiac Curse and Akito is no longer dying. **

**WARNING: I SHIP CANON ONLY, WHICH MEANS I SHIP SHIGURE X AKITO, TOHRU X KYO, AND KURENO X ARISA. If you do not appreciate these pairings, refrain from reading this fanfiction and do not waste your time flaming me. **

**While I will probably never have time to revise this story, PLEASE ENJOY, R&R! **

Chapter 7: My Dragon's Heart

Tohru Honda's grandfather is an extremely short, bald, dimple-cheeked creature with a constantly thrown-out back and a very shiny head. He has a tendency, only half-unintentional, to call Tohru "Kyoko," and to misplace his keys. When he arrived with Tohru on the day of my delivery to drop off a small parcel, his cardigan sweater and thick wool scarf smelled of pumpkin pie and almonds. The package the two of them presented me was small and green, tidily wrapped, a birthing gift that he had helped her select. I was advised not to open it until after my Kyoko came into our world.

Battling tears and bowing as deeply as my midriff allowed, I thanked them and agreed to their recommendation. Tohru embraced me. I winced and shifted weight, my feet still bandaged and smarting from the run-in with Isuzu and the mirror in the bathroom that she had smashed.

Shigure, who had become progressively calmer to compensate for my descent into absolute pre-natal panic, lethargically sniffed around at the package, cocked his eyebrow, and asked Tohru if it were a pair of new panties ("preferably a pink thong, Honda-kun," he added).

Fortunately, Grandfather Honda is also slightly hard of hearing.

Perhaps even more fortunately for my husband, my face-slapping aim has gotten extremely rusty. I teetered in the middle of a halfhearted effort, and he grabbed my waist, grinning wickedly, and steadied me, while Tohru blushed and sweat and sputtered, and that was that.

Oh well.

"Nine months today, is it?" Grandpa Honda trilled, seemingly impervious to the copious blushing of Tohru and myself, and to my husband's slightly unhinged giggling. He must be one of those people with uncannily high patience for all forms of foolishness and awkwardness.

I glanced uncertainly in Tohru's direction; she was already retreating to the kitchen to make me some stomach soothing tea.

Grandpa cast a glance at her back, then around the porch, his quietly pensive eyes taking in the natural jewelling of frost and snow on the grounds. Then he offered me his arm. "Am I correct, young lady?"

"You are, Honda-san," I breathed, as I took and squeezed that genteel old cardigan arm. "I am…a little scared. I am a small woman…there could be complications today."

Grandpa Honda fixed a long narrow stare on me. "…Hm! They told my daughter-in-law that taking walks helped to hasten her delivery. Made her walk all up and down the halls of the hospital when she went into labor with Tohru, to dilate her faster." His eyes twinkled.

I blinked. "That sounds…um…useful…"

"Shouldn't you be following suit, since you're naming your little one after Kyoko?" He let out a quaking, mirthful sound through his wrinkled lips. It harmonized oddly well with another bubbling spout of Shigure's giggles.

"…Oh." I realized this was a polite invitation.

"Go on," my Gure-ko cooed behind me, and I felt familiar hands dropping a coat over my shoulders. For once, I obeyed, and I began my stroll with Tohru's grandfather.

I had met the kind old Honda patriarch only once before. It had been a day when he and I both were visiting Tohru in the hospital, a little over a year ago, due to her horrible fall from unsteady earth on Sohma Estate. Her head had been badly traumatized and her arm—which I had slashed with the same butcher's knife with which I had stabbed Kureno—was broken.

I have bittersweet memories of that day. I had contributed to Tohru's distress, and then I had witnessed the accident in progress, helpless to reach out and snatch Tohru back from her agony…yet on the same day I had made the first friend of my entire life who had _chosen _me. And so my hospital visit, and my first meeting with the saintly old man, were both ambivalent experiences.

Yet, through ten minutes of silently ambling across garden paths, he seemed to remember me only with fondness. "I recall correctly, don't I, that you're one of my darling little Tohru's dear friends who came to cheer her up in her hospital bed? Forgive me, your face is familiar, Akito-san, I know you are very important to my granddaughter—it is just that the mind becomes rusty when you hit your late seventies."

Something told me he already knew exactly who I was…the way a loving parent passes difficult pieces of a jigsaw puzzle over to a small, hardworking child, "accidentally," in order to make the child feel special and accomplished. But I played along—and resolved to store his strategy up in my memory bank of good-parent behaviors.

"Yes, I went to see Tohru that day…I was frightened…when they took her away in the ambulance…it felt like my fault that she was out in the woods standing over that cliff…you see, she was trying to comfort me that day…" Oh yes, I sat there all day on her bed with her, talking, talking about so many things—mundane things like good tennis shoes, and profound things like how very deeply we miss our late fathers, Katsuyo and Akira, and how we both lost them to terminal illness, when we were little girls.

But that daylong visit was my atonement, not my Samaritan deed. I wish I could tell Grandfather Honda that he is too kind.

Perhaps he knows that already….maybe he's just one of those people, like his grandchild, and like so many members of my family, who are kind voluntarily, for the hell of it, as opposed to the obligatory accolades you would offer some "deserving" person. For deserving I am NOT.

That is what makes them all so beautiful to me.

"She says that she has her father's voice, but does not much resemble him," I muttered. "Even when I saw a photograph and insisted that she looked like Katsuyo. Only Kyo can convince her otherwise. My father Akira…he smelled like alcohol swabs because he was always very sick…but his voice was…like a dove call…we cannot lose the parents we love…a-anyway. Kyo took me aside later…the other day…said it wasn't me…that some fools at her father's funeral said there was no part of Katsuya in his daughter…I should like to STRIKE each of them!" I covered my mouth quickly, eyes downcast. "Gomenasai…I should not speak in such a vexed manner."

"There is no dishonor in the fury you feel for my grandchild. It is born of your love for her." His voice shook just slightly. "Your loyalty to her."

If he were on the verge of tears, I would not shame him by staring. I understood. Pride can be a family leader's livelihood. So I kept my eyes downcast as I continued. "Everyone says I look like my mother…my awful mother …who is very much like Tohru's maternal grandmother must have been…rejecting…cold…even cruel….she has hair like oil…"

"Oil?"

"Yes…yes, oil, I swear, OIL. And when my father Akira died…they all told me he was gone forever…and I did not realize that this was a lie until…until I was with child…and it dawned on me that he was in me all along. I want Tohru to know that too….I HAVE done dishonor, Honda-sama, to your granddaughter…but I will not anymore…in the heavens, Akira will be as proud as Katsuya…because I-I will…" I held onto his arm as though it were my tourniquet. "…well…Kyo said…that Tohru used to…say to you, Honda-sama, 'if I am really good, like daddy, maybe mommy won't go away too'…"

"…Yes."

"What sweet _desperation_, Honda-sama! I can relate so _well_…to a fear of being left behind…I will help to show Tohru-chan that she IS good….she IS good…and _no one_ will leave her behind…my little rice ball." I peered peripherally at the old man, voice trailing. "We call her that because of her story about the rice ball game and plums being like…"

"…like the blessings and worth people have that others must point out in order for them to see in themselves. Yes, Akito-san, I know. Tohru told me about the conversations the two of you had that day in the hospital…and have had since." Grandpa Honda eased back into speaking. "Beautiful conversations. Clearly you have learned much from them."

I paused, stared at my pigeon-toed feet, and chuckled. "Ojiisan knows more than he is letting on, and is a clever counselor."

"Oh, now you flatter me." His dimples stood out as he grinned. "All that I know is you have much in common with Tohru…and her mother."

A noise between a laugh and a gasp escaped me. "I have done _much_ evil. I could never be fit to tie Tohru's shoes, and I could never ever be the legendary Kyoko-san."

"_Akito_!" Suddenly my wrinkled little escort was sternly scowling at me, a finger jabbing my collarbone. He spoke in firm, clipped tones. "I shall point out YOUR plum, young lady! It takes tremendous courage to start over! This is what Kyoko did for Tohru, and it is what you are doing for your entire family, most of all this one," and he tapped my stomach. "Kyoko was a volatile, bitter girl, she lashed out and did _terrible_ things…all it took to save her was the realization that she was capable of _being_ loved. When she understood _that_, she moved the heavens to change herself into an utterly different human being. Do you see, Akito? It is just as destructive to hate yourself as it is to hate anyone else. Once you believe you are worth loving, half the battle is over!"

"I…" My eyes burned, followed by another mortifying emotional outburst: _"I think you are as adorable as your granddaughter!"_ And, helplessly, I embraced him. He was so tiny and old that I nearly knocked him over with my stomach.

But he was laughing, and patting my back. "Ahhh, good girl, that's the way."

"OH!" I nearly shrieked when the baby kicked, but when the movement was not followed by excruciating pain, I realized it was not quite time for labor.

"Oh dear!" The little old man's eyes widened. "Are you quite alright? Shall we go back?"

"No, no. Agh. Sorry. I am so tense—it is my nature to be….somewhat…passionate about things." I frowned. "That is uncanny."

"What is?"

"Well it seems that…the past two months, you see, I have been trying to repair some…things…with my family, and…"

"That is very admirable, Akito. And?"

"And well…every time, it seems, that I touch or…feel connected in some way, to another human being, she…she kicks." I fixed a studious scowl on my stomach.

There was a silence. I bit my lip. "That sounds foolish, doesn't it? I've always been superstitious and impressionable, I am sure it's just my imagination…"

"Are you?" Grandpa Honda offered incisively. "I'm not so sure myself. I think it would make perfect sense if it were true, actually. What you said about your father living on in the baby…Remarkable."

My eyes snapped up to meet his. I opened my mouth to speak…

"WHAT'S remarkable? HEY! What did I miss?" An unfamiliar female voice made me lurch out of his grasp.

A tall, slim young woman dressed in sweatpants swaggered up to us. She had short, tidy hair the kind of nutmeg color that seems indecisive as to whether it shall be blond or brown, chopped slightly unevenly at the neck, a practical self-done job. Her face was one of natural beauty—features that were clean, unblemished, crisply defined, and perfectly symmetrical, even without a trace of makeup. She had a solitary mole on the outside corner of her left eye. It seemed as defiant as her stride.

Mayuko Shirake, the homeroom teacher of Tohru, Yuki, and Kyo during their high school days, was standing on the frostbitten grounds of Sohma Estate holding a single rose. "I said, 'what did I miss?' " She sounded almost irritated.

I stammered. "Oh, ah well, we were just catching up on family history…and I was…hugging…Honda-sama…"

"An adept summation, Akito-sama," Grandfather Honda tittered, making a playful bow at our new visitor.

Mayuko gave an edgy nod, as though, with paper-thin patience, humoring an unruly student's palaver. Then she shoved the rose into my hands. "_You should give it to him_!" she brayed, making me jolt backwards with the sheer decibels of her voice. "You're…you're his _Head _and all!"

Grandpa Honda's eyes widened to saucers. "Er, oh dear…young lady, ah that is, Shirake-san, you seem rather distraught…"

"You…want me to give this rose…?" I began cautiously.

Mayuko was nodding so ferociously that I feared her head would come unscrewed and bounce around in a snowbank like an out-of-season beach ball.

"…to….?"

"_For God's sake_!" she bellowed, her face graduating from scarlet to fuchsia. "_To HATORI_!"

Oh. Of COURSE.

My doctor and cousin, Hatori Sohma, had been dating Mayuko for the past two years. Hatori relished the methodical slowness with which their relationship was progressing, milking and exploring every step of the courting process with his usual caution. But Mayuko, the proverbial Rapunzel, was about to chop off her hair, eat it, and take a running leap from her balcony window in frustration and impatience. I understood, and pitied, her.

"Young _lady_!" Grandpa Honda chastised, trying to hobble in front of, and protect, me. "Akito-san is due to give birth today!"

Mayuko's jaw dropped. "Oh CRAP, I— "

"It's quite alright!" I interjected, holding out a palm. Anything to keep the rabid, disgruntled schoolteacher back. "I am most capable of delivering a flower to my cousin!"

"I..oh…are you sure? I mean, if you're gonna pop out the kid today…Ha'ri's been talking about it constantly…I…know it's a big deal…" Mayuko scratched the back of her head and peered at me as though asking whether I were cheating on an exam.

"I have it from a reliable source that walking can only do me good," I crooned, casting a smiling gaze at Grandpa Honda, who reluctantly stepped aside.

"I can escort you," he croaked.

"That is kind of you, but unnecessary…Hatori's house is but ten feet down this path…you can see it on your tiptoes…ah, Mayuko, you are…tall enough that you can already see it…"

The homeroom teacher, who had been involuntarily following my advice, now plopped back down off her heels. "I knew that," she growled.

"Are you…sure….you want ME to give it to him?"

"Yes," she grunted. "And…tell him I love him. And I'm gonna _call_ him!" She balled her fists as though spotting an invisible punching bag.

"I will gladly do so," I replied, though something made my steps turn to lead as I continued alone.

I entered Hatori's house through the back door, the closest to his office, where he perpetually lived.

A long pause. I gulped, suddenly more afraid than Mayuko Shirake could ever be.

Hatori was seated squarely in his black leather office chair, back to me. He turned the page of a medical chart and scribbled something diligently with his fountain pen. Then he placed it on his desk and took off his reading glasses. He polished them with painstaking meticulousness. In the silence I could _feel_ him knowingly smiling. Sneaking up on Hatori was a fool's goal.

"What is it, Akito?" His voice was as gray as the smoke ribbons from one of his cigarettes. How he always knows WHICH Sohma is accosting him, without even glancing, remains a thing of wonder to me.

I froze in place. My heart swelled.

Strangely, it is Hatori, more than any other member of my family, whom I have always keenly wished to please. He silently oozes chivalry. He is loyal to a fault, brilliant, constant, and very, very wise, and for all these reasons, even at my most miserable, I have striven for strength and resilience, if only to please and comfort him. Foolish, perhaps, for a devoted doctor can immediately sense if a single hair of the patient is out of place—for Hatori is the one who has given me morphine and anti-nausea shots in arm, thigh, and hindside, Hatori is the one who has seen me in the ugliest states of ill dishevelment and knows that my breasts are too small and that I don't always shave the hair off my thighs, Hatori is the one who has held my hair while I have vomited, Hatori is the one who has my body thermostat, thyroid level, cholesterol level, menstruation cycle, and bowel cycle, among all other utterly bare and gruesome and embarrassingly intimate things, memorized. Yes, to pretend to Hatori is idiocy.

…Oh, but.

But.

But you can manipulate him. Hurt him. Call him "guilty" and "as cold as snow." You can gently, slowly kill him with your bottomless bane—he's made of the same cells and tissues and organs and whims and desires and needs as the people he treats. You can be a cruel, spiteful, capricious little girl, a little viper, and scar him—if you are so inclined.

Oh God. I just…. God. It was no wonder I was afraid to walk into that office, all of a sudden.

I need to please and encourage him now more than ever. And perhaps that is why my sole sin against my trusted and devoted Ha'ri, the violent denial of his first true love, Kana, years and years ago, still agonizes me.

I stepped up behind him, sliding the flower from Mayuko Shirake in his hair. "Somebody loves you. She asked that I give you this. I am told that she will call you on the phone this evening."

He stiffened, but rumbled a gravelly, diaphragmatic chuckle. "What—?"

"Oh, Ha'ri." He was so good, yet so lonely. I couldn't bear that it was my fault. I slid my arms around his neck and hugged him tightly. "Oh…oh, Ha'ri. I …Ha'ri." I put my forehead against his. I probably had halitosis from the morning sickness, unworthy parasite that I was, and probably, as my physician, he was used to that, too.

God. I felt like such a wanton bitch.

"Akito, really, what is the matter?" Deadpan, terse, stern with worry. "You've not had any strange cramps, any bleeding in your urine—?"

"Oh, no, no. We're fine, the baby and I. Thanks to you." While leaning over him, I heard myself whispering, softly, as though from another room, husky with shame and humility.

I thought on Grandpa Honda's words, and on his acknowledgment of Tohru's dead father, of my Akira, of lost fathers. Fathers.

"It's just that….it's funny—you're only eight years older than me but I can easily say you are the closest thing I have had to a father since Akira died. So many times you held me…after Ren came at me…just held me. And I…I don't know why you assumed that mantle. I can hardly have been the kind of child a man would want."

He fell silent. I felt his Adam's apple bobbing against the skin of my arms. I felt the muscles of his jaw trembling. Did it matter that much to him? Or was I imagining it? Then, with careful control, he murmured, "People would say that about Kyo, Akito, when they scolded Kazuma for adopting him. But we both know how wrong they were."

My eyes burned and blurred. How could he still feel so tenderly towards me? ME? "Ha'ri…take me for a drive. Take me out of here, it's stifling—Gure-ko is entertaining Tohru-chan and her grandfather, or I…I would ask him. Take me out! I want to tell you something and it feels… weird doing it in…in this room."

We were ten feet from the place where I had blinded him, in a fury against his love for Kana, with the shards of a broken ceramic vase. Ten feet from my guilt, and somehow I had been the one to deliver the flower from Mayuko. That place…it was staring me down in a tiny trickle of brown-red stains on the floor, and I felt sick, and feared I might lose my nerve trying to say what I was so desperate to convey to him. A diminutive Japanese Lady MacBeth. "…Please?"

"Today is your delivery date," came his inevitable response.

"I'll be fine, we needn't go far!"

"….Alright." And he produced his car keys from one of his white labcoat pockets.

We sat in Hatori's long, sleek black sedan, a quarter of a mile down the private grounds path in the woods, for a half hour in monastic silence. I had lost the nerve to apologize for my sins the moment he had picked me up and carried me to the car, scolding me for going overboard in my labor-day walking.

The car was parked on a hill overlooking the main grounds, with the Main House roof peeking from under the canopy. I stared at that roof fixedly, arms crossed, legs tucked under me, Indian-style. Closed off and once again afraid. "Hatori, I would like to look into some kind of corrective surgery for your left eye."

Hatori drew a deep, measured breath next to me, and sighed. "Akito."

My apprehension spiked to greater heights. "NO, please, let me speak..."

"Akito." Gently, patiently, firmly. Like a father.

Like MY father.

"…Yes?"

"…I…am well aware that sometimes, when we are anticipating a …big life change," and he nodded at my stomach, "we feel an overpowering need to tie up loose ends, and atone. But…"

Oh no.

My eyes squeezed closed. "If you are going to reject my apology as Rin-san did," I injected in a tight, thin voice, "then just get it over with. I cannot _bear _it from you, who have watched over me like a father, so _please just spit it out_!"

"_It is not necessary_!" he barked, instantly silencing me, with a brusque punch to the steering wheel. He continued in a simmering rumble, "Especially not today, when you ought to be relaxing! Did _Shigure _put you up to this? I may have reached my _limit _with that idiot. I don't care if he's like a brother to me, one of these days I may just actually _STRIKE_ him for his cute little machinations…."

I stared at him openly. "_What_? No! Shigu…NO, it was I, I alone, who wanted to say that I…"

"No."

"Hatori!"

Hatori, Hatori, I always shakily cooed, padding down the halls of the main house, hands outstretched for my tall, dark, lean centurion. So many times when I was a little girl, overcome by the agony of an inner void.

Hatori, hold me. Ha'ri. Ha'riii. Pick me up, Ha'ri. I feel sick, take care of me, Ha'ri. I feel sick.

A void too big for my frail little girl body.

I feel sick.

Ha'ri, someone. Hold me.

Please.

"Ha'ri…" I repeated it into the taut, exasperated silence of my caretaker, in a softer and more desperate voice. This was always my tactic, always, when all other resources failed: to be a begging god. A begging little girl, clinging, a weak nucleus, able to stand only with her family as her support and foundation. That was me.

Hatori shifted on the black leather seat. "I said no. There is no need. You know, Akito, you're always so intent on blaming yourself for you mistake all those years ago…yet if Kana had never been put to the test that your…excessively controlling…actions posed, I wonder if …."

I waited. My hands scraped the sides of my leather car seat. Pigeons that had forgotten to fly to warmer places now congregated on the ledge of my open car window, crooning at us both. I invited one onto my hand, stroked it. Waited some more.

At last Hatori resumed. "What I am trying to say is if you had never been around to show how quickly Kana was able to abandon me…those were Ayame's words, but there is some…some truth to it…then I might never have been placed in the position to meet Mayuko…and fall in love with her."

I sat there staring at his dashboard. "There is no excuse or justification for the things I did to you. Kana was a sweet girl. I used her unforgivably as a scapegoat for my fears."

He chuckled smokily. He didn't seem to even hear me. "Mayuko told you to give me the flower because she knows I'm going to ask the question soon. She saw the box."

This cryptic remark yanked me back from teetering over an emotional abyss. "What question?"

The most minute of pink hues stained his alabaster cheeks. "Well, Akito, she was snooping around my office yesterday and she saw the box with the ring."

I gasped. "You mean…"

"The diamond ring."

"_You are going to ask her hand in marriage_?" I lurched around in his direction, forgetting my self-indulgent angst. My face must have looked possessed with glee, because I suddenly had one of those grins you get that make your cheeks achy and sore.

"Mmm." His eyes slid along the periphery of my face, and he smiled in that vaguely conspiratorial, even glowing, way that he had smiled the day he told me I should see an obstetrician.

And ah, how very _different_ was my response than the first time he had told me he wished to marry a girl, and what an easy, smooth, relieving release of power it was: "_She must say yes_!" I wailed, flinging my arms high. All the birds in the vicinity of the snow-encased dirt road took flight at my outburst. "She MUST!"

And Hatori covered his mouth, laughing as I had never heard him laugh, welling up with relief. It was a deliciously crusty, yet melodic, noise. Shaking with mirth, he regarded the horizon of the bare trees down the road, and for the first time I saw, with fascination, laughter creases on the sides of his eyes. You know, that endearing sort of skin crinkles just past the rim of someone's eyelashes. I wanted to kiss those crinkles. Nothing had made me happier all day.

Hatori wiped his eyes and nodded. "I certainly agree," he concluded calmly, medically, yet, even though his hand still covered his mouth, I could _hear_ the wry smirk through the rational summation.

"Oh I…" I was smiling sheepishly and now my face must have been flaming. "I just meant…"

"I know what you meant. I have always highly valued your zeal, Akito-chan," he said, through another impulsive guffaw.

"I have never heard you laugh so much!" I half-gasped, making icy fogs on the car window, tilting my head to better observe him. "I think I will really come to love your Mayuko."

"I call her May." He tugged the stick shift, setting the car in motion, and zipping it in and out of a fork in the path so as to return us home.

Again, that coolly objective, colorless voice, but he was smiling so broadly, now, that I could see his canine teeth.

And I adored his canine teeth, as ludicrous as this sounds, because they were just slightly crooked, and human, and it reminded me how he had a heart, and was no longer hibernating, but capable of being thawed and made truly happy. I turned and drew the pattern of a long, ribboning sea dragon in the fog that my breath had made on the window. "May?"

"_Hai_, May," Hatori explained, "because it is the English word for a month in spring, and it impresses her that I read so vastly and in numerous languages, out of her parents' bookstore."

My spirit felt a pang. Spring. I found myself reciting something that Tohru told me, and that Shigure said Kana once recited like a mantra: "When the snow melts, it becomes…"

_Spring_.

But Hatori, who was focusing steadily on the horizon as he taxied us back, did not say Spring. "_Rebirth_," he rumbled. The smile had become more sober, but it retained great tenderness. He flipped on the turn signal.

"Really?" I breathed. I wished I could see the half-blind left eye as he said this.

"Really. _Let it go_, Akito. I have."

"…You do Sohma House much honor by your character and actions, Hatori-sama. Your mercy."

"I do not deserve such an august title," Hatori snapped. Now he was stern again, lips thin, and the pale flush had returned to his cheeks. "Now, do I have your permission to marry Mayuko or not?"

Permission! Had I ever dared demand such blind loyalty and submission from this wonderful man?

I put my head on his arm as he drove. "I love you, and whatever it is you want to do with your life, and the people in it, is _your_ decision alone, forevermore. I am your counsel and your support in all things. You have my...my blessing…And you _never_ need my permission again."

He said nothing, but, when he parked us in the back by the bird fountain, he dropped on my forehead a kiss that felt so soft that it might have been the kiss of a breeze. "Akito-sama has become a wise young woman indeed," he finally remarked, with a nod, as he unstrapped his seatbelt, and leaned over me to help with mine. "Were she my own daughter, I would be prouder than I could bear. Akito-sama has my gratitude." As ever, it was gentleness and devotion wrapped up in the brusque, efficient tone of a medical prognosis.

"And Hatori-san has mine," I managed to choke out, fighting the usual irritating hormonal tears. I wiped my eyes. The baby kicked so hard, once more, that I yelped. "OH! On my father's spirit, I want this child to pop out of me right NOW. She is using the walls of my ribcage for a bass drum!"

"Soon," he chuckled, cranking open his car door. "Very soon, I'm sure."

"That is good," I grumbled, while glaring down at my swollen midriff, "since you are always right about everything."

"You are canonizing me again, Akito-chan," he retorted, opening my door "We are none of us gods or demons, but merely humans."

"I am sorry. I think I…do that because of how much I loved father, and hated….Ren. I think I have split everyone else in half too, as if …the first two people I knew…were sort of embedded in everyone else."

"It is possible," Hatori said, slipping his hands under me. "And I am afraid she won't be 'popping out.' The process is a little more difficult, where on earth did you pick up such slang?"

I smiled slyly as he lifted me out of the car. "Why, from your fiancée-to-be."

He blushed again and I could just squeeze him to death as he mumbled, "Erm, oh I see."

"Akito-chan!" A small hand stroked my back, and I craned my neck to see Tohru holding a steaming cup of tea. "Come visit with me for a little bit." She smiled sunnily.

I chuckled at her typical bravado. "I will be grumpy today," I admitted, leaning my head into Hatori's chest. The sound of his heartbeat was calming. "You won't tire of me, with my poor nerves?"

"I would never tire of you, Aki-chan!" the singing reply. Ah, sweet child. I was so glad of the blessing of her presence.

"Ha'ri." I peered up at my dear Dragon. "Could I…?"

"If you sit still, you may spend as long as you like with Honda-san and her grandfather," he rumbled, already carrying me towards the back porch. "If that is agreeable with you," he added, casting Tohru a stern look that ordered her to keep me behaving well.

She nodded, squeezing my hand and absolutely beaming. "Actually, Grandpa told me to keep Aki-chan's company while he talked to Shii-kun!"

"I see. So that's where he is." Hatori scoffed and deposited me gently on the side steps, with sight of the immense concrete birdbath that served as a marker for my father's grave. I gazed lovingly at that monument, while the man who was nearly my surrogate father added, "Akito, I'll go tell your idiot husband to stop floating about entertaining guests today, while you two are at it."

"Ah, be gentle with him," I winked. "He is excited and worried too, it is just that he always compensates for my nerves with his sangfroid."

"Whatever you say, Akito-chan," he sighed. "As I have said before, Shigure has certainly improved since he married you. He'd better just keep his track record as good as it's been of late."

I laughed, relinquishing. "Okay. Go shout at him."

Tohru blinked and sat next to me, carefully offering me my cup, while my dear Hatori stalked off to berate his lifetime friend for slacking off in his perfection as my husband for a whole of ten minutes. I sipped obediently, smiling contently at our rice ball from over the brim.

"How are you?" she chirped.

"Terrified," I replied, with a clumsy sort of giggle.

"Oh, Aki-chan…"

"I will be alright. I have you here." I touched her pink, round cheek; it was now my turn to be maternal with her, as opposed to the reverse. "My friend."

Her eyes moistened. "_Itsumo_," she gulped, nodding.

"I know." The baby kicked. I touched my stomach pensively. "Your grandfather told me many useful things today. I told him I'd give back what you gave me, someday and somehow."

"You have already. My mother lives on in the name of your child," she choked.

"And my father lives on in her, as well. As yours lives on in you, darling Tohru-chan."

"…you think?"

"I know. And so does your Kyo…and…and…woah…" The baby kicked yet again.

But it was more than a kick this time. The movement continued, and felt more feverish. And suddenly a sharp, squeezing, red-hot rod of pain plunged from my navel downward, and again, and a third time…at regular intervals.

I gasped, dropping my teacup, grasping my stomach—I had never known such pain.

Tohru seized me by the arms, eyes wide. "Akito…?"

The fire pains again. A strange pulsing in the muscles of my lower regions. "Oh God…" And again, much much stronger. I buckled. My nails dug into her arms and I yelped. "…I…I think…" The yelp became a sob, and, then, as the fire seized and wrenched my entire abdomen, a strangled scream. "…she's COMING…"

Father, look down on me.

Shigure was upon me all of a sudden, behind me, under me, carrying me to the bed. I wondered how long he had been there listening to us, watching over me, as always, without me even knowing it…

Father, give me strength.

I must stay here for my family.

In this my greatest battle…

"OH…!" I felt like my body was going to rend in two. I felt like the weight of the world was ripping me apart from my thighs up.

"You already started…" Shigure was mumbling to himself with that maddening calm, covering me from the waist down in white wool blankets. "Your typical drama, beloved wife….This is the fastest labor I've ever…"

"OHHH!" I shrieked up at the ceiling, wanting to cry, wanting to faint, wanting to stop it coming. A new life was upon me and I was so scared. I was scared she'd come out dead, or ill, or that I would not be a good mother, that I would be my mother, my horrible mother Ren. I was so scared.

Now Shigure was behind me, bracing me upright. "Legs apart, honey, but don't push, and breathe…TOHRU, LEAVE THE TEA AND GO GET HATORI…!" In all my recollection, all my 22 years, I had heard my husband raise his voice fewer than five times. And right now, he was roaring. "NOW!"

"Y-yes!" my rice ball bleated, fleeing the room.

I wept and wept and tried very hard not to push the fire pains down, through, and out of me, just yet.

Oh Akira, father. It hurts.

Father, let me be just Akito now. Not God, not special, just Akito.

Just a woman. Just a mother.

Let her be born just a normal happy child.

Just a normal human being. No bonds and no insurmountable miseries. Just a normal human being.

Father.

Let nothing go wrong.

Please.


	8. Interlude: The Birth

**Not My Mother's Hair:**

**A Series of Vignettes from the Diary of Akito Sohma  
A Fruits Basket/Furuba Fanfiction by Amber Stitt **

**Chapter 8: Interlude **

DISCLAIMER: WARNING, MANGA SPOILERS AFTER CHAPTER 98 IN THE DISCLAIMER! "Fruits Basket/Furuba" in its anime and manga formats are the creation and property of Takaya Natsuki and I in NO WAY claim ownership or profit thereof.

RATED PG FOR SWEARING AND MATURE THEMES (DEATH, CHILDHOOD TRAUMA).

This story explores Akito Sohma's change-of-heart in the manga and her subsequent possible attempts to make amends with various family members. It is told from Akito's POV. If you still dislike her even after the manga brilliantly illustrates her personal pains and makes her a sympathetic character, take your cold heart elsewhere and don't bother to read this story, LOL.

If you do not believe that positive regard would ever occur between Tohru and Akito, you have only to acknowledge that THE MANGA ITSELF proposes peace and new friendship between them, in chapters 120-130 (released in Japan only as of July 2006). Don't flame me for sticking to CANON.

In this fanfiction, which will be comprised of SEVERAL SHORT CHAPTERS, Akito Sohma's gender is FEMALE, in correspondence with MANGA CANON POST-CHAPTER-98. The story depends HEAVILY on the MANGA as opposed to the anime.

This story takes place AFTER THE EVENTS OF CHAPTER 131 OF THE MANGA: Therefore the Sohmas are FREE from the Zodiac Curse and Akito is no longer dying.

WARNING: I SHIP CANON ONLY, WHICH MEANS I SHIP SHIGURE X AKITO, TOHRU X KYO, AND KURENO X ARISA. If you do not appreciate these pairings, refrain from reading this fanfiction and do not waste your time flaming me.

While I will probably never have time to revise this story, PLEASE ENJOY, R&R!

"_Try telling me then! What's 'real'? Well? Is it parental love? That sure isn't perfect! There's a swarm of parents in just the Sohma family who abandoned their children! You sure did!"—_Sohma Akito, to her mother Ren, Fruits Basket Chapter 98, by Natsuki Takaya.

"_It will be one human child, that much I know, Kyoko. It's all right. Your child will be a human just like you. The things that you were happy to receive and the things that happened to you to make you sad you won't forget, and you'll be there for your child. You'll give it lots of embraces and touches…you'll listen to what your child has to say. If it does something wrong you'll be sure to teach it why those things are bad. And if you ever lose control of yourself and end up wronging that child, then you will apologize, and then you'll hug again." –_Honda Katsuya, to Honda Kyoko, Fruits Basket Chapter 92, by Natsuki Takaya.

I do not know how long the pain possessed me before I heard that sweetly gurgling, indignant outcry, and found myself closing my eyes at last, awash in the coolest, freshest, purest blue of repose. I do know that I lay in a pool of my own sweat. I do know that the hot, searing, ripping waves of agony came at swifter and swifter frequencies. I do know that I screamed aloud several times, that I prayed to Akira to spare my child and me, and wished to simply take flight through a crack in the ceiling above me, and escape the pain. I do know that Shigure was holding me upright, bracing me from behind, through the whole battle.

"There is none like Akito," my Gure-ko whispered to me things that I had long since doubted. "Akito is the bravest. Akito is the strongest. Akito can and will do this."

I do know that Hatori rushed from the foot of my bed to the head in explosive, crisp intervals, hand on my head and bracing me, murmuring to my husband, then back between my legs, coaching, murmuring, cheering, guiding, and enticing as only a doctor with his whole heart invested in his patient can.

But I do not know how I managed to expel her. I do not know how I managed to give her life.

But I did.

I did. Me!

And then I was lying there, exhausted, resting at last, triumphant, and it was done, it was done. And I was bathed in that heartshaking, blessed sound of a healthy baby crying. And I opened my eyes, and I had been born again too. I reached around weakly for her. All I wanted to do was claim and comfort the source of that living sound. Even if all others abandoned me, I would not abandon her.

"So the family's here," Shigure breathed, caressing my sweaty forehead.

It was then that I realized how very far from alone I was.

I made out my _liebchen_ Momiji holding the slide door open, and, either sitting against the wall or still lingering in the doorway, was every one of the Juunishi and each of the people who had become as good as flesh and blood to us: a worried Tohru, a pacing Kyo, a shrugging Hatsuharu, a politely rigid Yuki, a tensely crouching Isuzu, a brooding Hiro, a wide-eyed Kisa, a gaping Ritsu, a bubbling Kagura, a gesticulating Ayame, and a gaggle of maids, among them my oldest servant, well in her sixties, and two of my mother Ren's former psychiatric care maids. Seated in the porchway with an intensely relieved facial expression was Kureno, with Arisa Uotani leaning on his good shoulder and talking animatedly into her cellphone at Saki Hanajima and insisting upon her immediate presence at "A-Chan's birthing." Behind them peered Tohru's grandfather and a flushed Mayuko, who was staring fixedly at Hatori as he clipped the umbilical cord. Half of them looked shocked or stunned, the other half were crying or laughing or babbling, or all three. Everyone had come. I had never felt so free of loneliness in all my life.

"You're…all here," I gasped.

"They're all here," Shigure, still behind me, still bracing me upright, reaffirmed. His voice was shaky and somehow buoyant.

"All of us," Kureno echoed Shigure from his corner, with Arisa still on his arm, still nodding, tossing me one of her gang victory signs and winking at me through her mane of blond hair. Both their eyes shone. How very right it felt, for all four of us.

And Hatori lifted her high, that perfect little spirit, that gift and redemption, that hope which belonged to me, that hope that I would guard and nourish forevermore. He lifted her up and inspected her in the electric overhead light, and in the sun peering through the window and the thick gray winter sky. He exalted her, swathed in that simple white blanket. His face was blank, his eyes narrowed in scrutiny, but his cheeks were ruddy and a vein pressed out against his temple as though he were holding something powerful inside, restraining something, for just another moment. I saw his Adam's Apple lilt up and down, many many times. A clean, crystal silence—it resounded among the members of my great, gathered family. We all watched my Kyoko held aloft for a second and an eternity. She threw wide all four round, milky limbs at the cold, bewildering, enormous place that flooded her newborn senses, and emitted a defiant and determined cry. She blinked her newly opened eyes and looked, and saw, the family and the world that was hers, for the first time. She cried out again, with such courage.

My daughter.

I wept and wept, and Shigure, who never weeps, joined me.

And then Hatori's arms floated down, and he took my baby to the washbasin in the corner that Tohru had helped drag in, about ten feet away. His good eye was facing me. He took the towel off of my Kyoko, and held her little spine and head in alignment, held them with security and ease in one arm, my beloved doctor, as he dipped his free hand into the basin, and cupped up a steady stream of warm water and unleashed it over her tiny body. Kyoko kicked and squealed, reached out and seized his tie between two small hands. She squealed again, and squinted, as though trying to recollect his face.

Then my Dragon's face twisted up, and he stopped washing the baby. He leaned in gently, and nestled his injured eye against Kyoko's healthy, fresh, clean little torso, against her tiny chest. The happy buzz of murmurs that had risen now dwindled. Hatori rocked my baby once, twice, and squeezed his eyes still more tightly shut. His lips curled upward. Then he whispered a salutation to my child: "Welcome, spring."

Kyoko shrieked, a happy and declarative sound, spreading her arms and legs once more.

Hatori opened his eyes, and laughed as I had heard him laugh only once before, earlier that afternoon. "The whole world hears you, little one," he rumbled. "We have all been expecting you." His eyes were moist as he placed antibiotic drops in my daughter's. He stood, walked over to me, bent down, and handed me my whole life and purpose.

A small bundle, but she was everything. She was everything.

"Akito-sama, Shigure-san, may I present your perfect daughter."

Shigure's cheek pressed hard against mine; it was warm and wet, and he was still quietly gasping. He gasped louder, once or twice, at sight of the beauty in that bundle in my arms, looking up at us both. "I love you," my cautious, scheming husband was now openly laying out his hand, dissolving any and all strategy, candid, breathing this incantation, over and over, at me, at our child. Making his pledge and vow. "I love you, I love you, always always always. Above all others, I love you." And my Dog, who never did anything but enigmatically grin at people, now continued to bawl down at our Kyoko like a bleating, lost, helplessly joyful lamb, and I don't think I had ever loved him more than I did that moment. "My God, look at you," he blubbered. "I love you, ahaha, I LOVE you."

"Yes. This is usually when it becomes _really_ real to the father," Hatori wryly remarked, with a suspicious sniffle of his own. He went and stood behind us, my Dragon centurion, and placed his hand on each of our backs.

"Shut up," Shigure laughed through his utterly humbled tears.

I felt buoyant and warm and bright. I felt clean and pardoned. I felt alive. I was holding my baby. How was such consuming love possible upon first sight?

Or had I really known, and awaited, her, all my life? "We have all been expecting you," Hatori had said. Yes. Yes, we had. I had.

I looked down at her face, smiling up at me, reaching, gurgling, feeling, thinking and knowing, KNOWING me, and I saw my father Akira in her eyes. And my spirit soared. At last I knew what it had been to fly as Kureno had flown, all through my childhood. "I've been waiting for you, Kyoko," I whispered. "Yeah. Mommy's been waiting." Mommy. What a perfect word. And I kissed her forehead.

And my baby smiled at me. Me! And she cooed and reached. For me! I did not disappoint her. I took her hand in my pinky. I kissed it over and over, lightly, softly, making her gurgle and giggle. I would live to make that happy sound. I would do anything. My own life no longer meant anything substantial but to serve and protect the life of my daughter.

At last, I was needed. Me!

Shigure rolled out in front of us, on his side, placing his cheek on my stomach, and simply watching us. His face was a red and puffy mess. There was no handsomer man on all earth as my Gure-ko that very moment.

A throat timidly cleared. Tohru scooted towards us on her knees, holding the package that she and her grandfather had delivered that morning. "Please," she said, her own face streaming with happy tears, "please open it now."

Momiji galloped over to help us, kneeling beside Shigure and me, wafting a smell of saltwater taffy and aftershave—Momiji, appropriately, for he was my cousin with a heart most enduringly like a child's. He slipped his purple-nailed fingers around one side of the package, and I tugged as best I could on the other side while holding my cooing daughter. Between us, and with a little help from Shigure, the package unfolded, to reveal a breathtaking infant's kimono, tailored of shimmering navy silk and embroidered in yellow, gold, and orange flowers.

Shigure, whose wavy black hair was already seized in Kyoko's curious little fists, gave a quiet yelp of surprised and pleased recognition.

And with good reason: It was an exact replica of the kimono that my husband had given me two years ago, as a "gift of parting" for the old, bitter, selfish me, and a welcoming gift for the new me—woman, mother of my family, friend and counsel, never to hurt or judge again. The little kimono that my Rice Ball Tohru-chan had found for my Kyoko was like an anniversary of my first rebirth, on the day of my second.

"…Oh, Tohru," I gulped, and could manage to say no more.

"Does it please you?" she breathed, hands nervously fingering her chestnut hair. Kyo knelt beside her, taking her shoulders gently in his hands, his garnet eyes both alert and wondering as he regarded Kyoko.

My baby squealed and gawked at my renegade cousin's flaming orange hair, breaking that "eternal" bond of hate between Family Head and Cat in the Sohma clan, finding him amazing and acceptable upon first sight. He smiled—bashfully, if it were possible with Kyo—down at her.

I gave a trembling laugh and nodded. "It is more than pleasing. More than pleasing, Tohru. It is like…like a mother's gift…" And again I was unable to speak as I put my forehead against hers.

"You should put her in it right now, Little Momma-san," Hatsuharu pleasantly droned, pacing in a contented circle around us all.

"_Jawohl,_ right away!" trilled Momiji, unfolding the beautiful garment and shoving it at Shigure. "Go ahead, Daddy!"

"Jeez, kid," Kyo barked at my Rabbit "you wanna go easy already, newborns have soft spots and fragile spines an' all that!"

"You're the last one who should be lecturing people about recklessness," Yuki crooned from some corner. The obligatory taunting between Cat and Rat, but it had gotten so much softer these past two years. Still—an obligation was an obligation. Perhaps, between those two, it was almost comforting to have the constant of their gentle, almost good-natured animosity. "Just don't hand her to him, Shigure."

My husband burst into giggles. "Do I look THAT dumb?"

"YOU HAVE SOME NERVE," Kyo blared, red-cheeked and endearingly predicable, at both my Rat and my Dog.

Shigure just giggled again.

Kyoko jolted at the sound of my husband's mirth, as though in recognition. She shrieked out a noise like a baby version of a belly laugh, reaching in disparate directions, uncertain of what fascinating, loud, colorful object to next yank or drool on.

"Settle down," Hatori growled at my fuming Cat. He lifted my daughter into his arms and gestured at Shigure to help put the kimono on. "I SAID shut up, Kyo."

From her corner, Mayuko, who had always found Kyo a problem student, hooted.

"WHAT, I didn't say ANYTHING!" my Cat huffed.

"Oh dear," Tohru mumbled, wide-eyed.

And I laughed—not because of what they were all saying, as much as because of the encompassing warmth of it, of the fact that they all loved my little one so much, that my sins hadn't damned her against them. I laughed in sublime relief, and all the cousins near me smiled. Momiji stroked my arm and winked at me.

Shigure collected our daughter carefully, almost awkwardly at first, to his chest, his lips pursed in a ceaseless "oh" of awe, his eyes melted chocolate for our child.

Hatori mumbled to my husband on occasion, that wry, infinitesimal curl playing the edges of his lips as he helped slip on the tiny kimono. Then he gave our Kyoko fully over to her father. "All yours," he rumbled. "And the rest of you, ease off, the mother and baby need their rest." He reset his stethoscope around his shoulders like a war general flashing his badges to remind his troops of his credentials. He sat back on his haunches, and Mayuko joined him, quietly rubbing his shoulders.

Shigure sank back down beside me. He gazed down at Kyoko's tiny, wavy dark head. It was a vulnerable little replica of his own, fused with my subtle plums and midnight blues, a messy beautiful little head leaning back against his chest. My Dog looked too afraid to move, or perhaps too amazed. "Look at you," he chuckled, once again. "I think I just breathed for the first time."

"Yeah," I nodded, shifting down in my pillows, closer to them. "Yeah, me too."

Kisa scooted over to us on her knees, leaning against Tohru, flush with excitement. "I'm so glad she's healthy," my first absolver cooed. "I hope being a mommy feels like you thought." She beamed up at me, and I beamed back.

"Better," I whispered, tweaking my Tiger's nose.

"Those are your eyes—your lips, and…and your boldness. Oh, Aki, look, she has your little ears." Shigure stroked Kyoko's tiny cheek, caused her to squawk and seize his knuckles and chew on them. "Hehe. And your ferocity. What a formidable woman she is!"

Kureno crawled over on all fours, leaning over us. "She is her mother's child," he crooned. "With her father's…sense of mischief," he added, as Kyoko gurgled with glee and flung one of the towels Hatori had used to clean off her afterbirth right in his face.

Shigure grinned fiendishly. "Good girl," he breathed, kissing the top of our daughter's head. "Just like mommy, though. Just like mommy."

"You think?" I felt so shy suddenly. So…unworthy, I suppose. "You think, because…I thought she looked exactly like you…"

"Far too good to be this dirty old dog!" He laughed and shook his head, and Kyoko bounced along with him as he shook. She blinked, and then, once again, she shrieked out a shrill, miniature version of his bubbling cackle.

Have I mentioned that I love them both so much? It warrants eternal reiteration, I guess.

I love them both so much.

"Oh, she's so beautiful," Tohru gushed, as Arisa slung an arm around her shoulders and made a grunt of agreement. "She is so much like both of you!"

Kureno went very silent for a moment, dropping the towel Kyoko had flung at him, and I, who had spent nearly 15 years of my life in his constant company, who knew it meant something, was drawn to his pensiveness. "What?" I murmured.

All eyes turned to my Rooster. He hardly stirred. But he looked like he longed to do something very particular.

"He ought to tell a story," Momiji cooed. "Kyoko's mama likes stories." He was referring of course to the time he told me of the Foolish Traveler…a tale that had convinced me to visit Tohru in the hospital, and initiate our now airtight friendship. What he didn't realize was how correct he was—how Kureno had always been my storyteller, night after terrified night in my childhood.

"Yes, Kureno," I breathed, for I knew my _liebchen_ had hit the mark. "Tell Kyoko a story."

"…Well." Kureno stirred, shifting weight from one knee to the other, doubtless because his back, where I had stabbed it years ago, was aching again. But no. Wounds would heal now. I would make certain of that.

My Rooster looked to my Dog for permission—for assurance that he was not making a trespass. Shigure snuggled down closer to me, to our child still in his arms, but made no move to block Kureno. He nodded at Kureno, quietly, once. His eyes were soft and forgiving. He seemed to understand the greater significance of the moment. I loved him even more for it.

So Kureno nodded back, and reached out a single index finger, and, with it, methodically, rhythmically smoothed back the matted little dark tuft of my daughter's hair. Her bright little eyes drooped more and more as he began to tell a story he'd told me countless nights through my childhood. "Well, one time, while he traveled in the sky, the bright, shining Mr. Moon heard the sound of a mallet thunking in a small clearing. He decided to investigate. As he came to land in the clearing, he saw a small rabbit nearby. The rabbit looked up with startled eyes, dropping his mallet. 'Mr. Moon-san! I didn't expect to see you, but I'm glad you came by!' Mr. Moon smiled, because it was very lonely for him up in the sky sometimes. 'Thank you, Mr. Rabbit. It's nice to have someone to talk to.' Mr. Rabbit's ears twitched happily."

"That's me!" Momiji trilled.

"Don't spoil it," snarled Kyo.

Behind a medical chart, on the floor near us, Hatori snorted.

Kureno waited patiently through the outburst, grinning in his bashful, naïve manner at our younger cousins, then continued. " 'I was just making some mochi," said Rabbit-San. 'I'd be delighted if you'd honor my table with your presence, and join me that we can have a meal together as friends.' Mr. Moon blinked, tears forming in his eyes. 'I'll be honored, Mr. Rabbit. Thank you.'"

I found myself mouthing each word of the story, to the letter, until he was finished. Shigure and Arisa both watched—my husband with reserved but genuine respect for my Rooster, perhaps the first he had shown since they were both children, and my Rooster's new lover with unabashed adoration. "He could smile stepping in dog crap," she muttered her usual adage about her lover to Tohru, and all three of we women giggled conspiratorially.

Then I smiled at my Kureno, my childhood guardian, leaned forward and kissed his index finger. I leaned back into my husband. "Kyoko, little butterfly," I whispered, "that is an important story. It means that you must always remember that the most important thing in the world is to be kind, and you will never be alone, and you will make much happiness." These were Kureno's words. His gentle legacy would be my first of my family's many gifts to my child. She would heed them as I had failed to do, because I would make sure she flourished in an environment that would let her.

A shifting nearby, and Hatsuharu plopped down, sitting Indian style, and sat in front of us, effecting the nature of a yogi. He sat there in silence for several moments, to a point where some of the less reverent of the slowly trickling-out cousins, such as Kagura and Ayame, tittered at him. Still he didn't stir. Kureno blinked in puzzlement, and Arisa chuckled, shook her head, stood, and went to bring me fresh towels, dragging the gleamy-eyed, sweet Tohru with her.

Shigure, smiling wryly, handed the baby to me, and I cleared my throat, and handed it to Ha'ru. This caused him to come out of his peaceful trance, as he looked down at the baby.

"I called you an ogre once," he calmly blurted, cocking his head in thought. "After the New Years' Party two years ago. When you smashed that vase into Yuki's forehead."

Shigure stirred. "Ha'ru." A warning was smeared all over his tone, and his eyes withdrew to that cold, almost murky gray hue that was the sole signifier of his displeasure, for he was still, as always, smiling.

I put a hand on my husband's arm to quell him. My limbs went numb and tingly, and my heart thundered. I heard someone swiftly leaving the room—doubtless, Yuki himself, for I heard Kyo scoffing about his rude sudden exit, and, nonetheless, following him. I found my voice. "That was unforgivable of me…"

"I love you, Little Momma. I mean, I really do." Just as abruptly, my Ox proceeded. "Didn't think I ever would but I do. It's all gonna be okay now." And then he smiled. "You have reasons to be here. You're needed. Yeah. We need you. Relax." He looked down at Kyoko, who squirmed and made a faint google of protest in his arms, her tiny sweet fingers curling into fists. "She needs you too."

"GAH!" my baby declared, reaching for me insistently.

Reaching. For me!

"I exist for her," I breathed back, in a tone so very saturated with shakiness, and strength, and wonder, and tenderness, that I wasn't sure it was my own voice. "She has saved me. She is the hope of this family. And I…I need this family. I need it." I laughed clumsily, taking the perfect little living bundle back into my arms. "Every cell in my body needs each of you. For her, I…I will protect and preserve every last one of you. For the rest of my life." I set my jaw and gazed right into his hazy gray eyes, and I pledged it: "This family will be my legacy to my daughter." I bit my lip. "Please…tell Rin that."

"Already done, Little Momma." His smile was enigmatic as his eyes shifted to a point somewhere behind me.

I turned just long enough to watch Isuzu backing out of the room, tripping over some of the blankets and medical charts Hatori had left there, and retreating. I sighed, stroking my baby's face in thought. "I would like you to ask her something…I have heard she is a very good artist…from Tohru. Could you send to ask her to draw a portrait of Kyoko sometime…soon?"

"Not a bad idea," Ha'ru nodded sedately. "Not a bad idea at all." He gave me a very gentle nookie, kissed Kyoko on top of the head, and stood. "I'll go see about it now." And out he sauntered.

I felt so triumphant, quietly, that I could simply raise up and fly out the window.

Shigure, who knew me best, who always will, must have sensed it. He kissed me, newly mussed hair and all, and collected Kyoko again. "Come on. She'll be right next to you in her cradle. She needs to sleep now."

"Wise words," Hatori rumbled approvingly nearby. "Need help, papa?"

"This should be good," Mayuko cracked, while helping him to file through his papers. And when I sat up straighter to protest her judgment of my husband, she lifted a hand, smiling warmly, and added, "A joke, mommy, a joke. Ex-girlfriend humor."

I flushed, smiling back. "Of course….take her, Gure-Ko. Look after our little butterfly."

"Butterfly, yes," my husband crooned as he lifted her into his arms once more. "Butterfly, and firefly." He began to rock her rhythmically, in a light-footed, soft sort of dance, as he made his way to, and around, the crib, almost as if celebrating their first meeting, and he was humming a song in his sly, playful tenor. "My mother Shinobu taught me this song when I was a kid," he tossed over his shoulder, grinning helplessly, his cheeks a little flush, just the way they always were when I was a little girl and he gave me flowers from my father's garden. Happy with those to whom he, with his canine loyalty, despite his aloof and cunning airs, was devoted. "It's called '_Hotaru Koi'_—"

"Sing for us," Mayuko chortled.

"Don't encourage him," Ha'ri groaned, but he was smiling too.

Shigure had already begun to humor the request, in a soft, lilting tone, rocking Kyoko, who was cooing back at him, from side to side. "Ho, firefly, come, there's some water that's bitter to taste, come, here's some water that's sweet to your taste; ho, firefly, ho, up this mountain path."

Momiji stood and danced around behind them, taking Kisa's hand, and they all danced around in a sweet, silly, adorable trail, as Shigure continued, "Firefly's daddy struck it rich, so he's got lots of dough, no wonder that his rear end sparkles in the dark. Ho, firefly, up this mountain path."

"Jeez," Hiro scoffed, rolling his eyes. "Teach your kid about glowing butts. Really praiseworthy."

Kureno laughed. "Shh," he quietly chided.

At this moment Arisa and Tohru stepped in. "Glowing BUTTS?" Arisa gawked. "The HELL?"

"Shhhhh," Kureno repeated.

I had to try very hard not to laugh myself. But it was alright, Shigure was already laughing, joyfully, with abandon, as he finished the song, and slowly lowered our child into her cradle: "In the daytime hiding 'mongst the dewy blades of grass, but when it's night, his lanter burns bright. E'en though we've flown all the way from India, zoom! and those sparrows swarm to swallow us. Ho, firefly, come, there's some water that's bitter to taste, come, here's some water that's sweet to the taste; Ho, firefly, up this mountain path, look! see a thousand lanterns sparkling in the dark, ho, up this mountain path." By the time he reached the close of the last verse, he was whispering the words, and Kyoko was sound asleep. "Oh, look at you," he seemed unable to stop saying. His face as he said it…ah, his face. I can't even explain it, reader.

I watched my husband put our baby to bed, held him in my eyes until he returned to my side. I put my hands on each side of his face and rested my forehead against his. "Gure-ko…If I could write a book as you do, the hero would be you."

"Then we will be each other's heroes," he purred, leaning in to kiss me again.

Heaven.

And I soared.


	9. My Rat's Freedom

Chapter 9: My Rat's Freedom

I had not left Kyoko's bedside since I was able to stand again. The night after the miraculous delivery, I curled up next to her crib and simply watched her. Many times she'd wake and bleat uncertainly at the big, dark, cold room around her, and I'd lift her into my arms and rock her—mommy was here. Mommy would always be here to console and protect. She believed me—I could feel her trust in the way she nestled into me, the way her little limbs slackened. It was amazing. Amazing.  
Shigure slept next to me most of this time. I think he was as awestruck, and enamored, at Kyoko as I was, for all his worldly knowledge of things. On one occasion I placed our daughter on his stomach and let her wriggle around, and he froze, afraid of a single sudden move. I laughed and assured him he was probably better skilled at handling infants than I was, as one of the three oldest Jyunishi.   
"I am just waiting for Ayame to have some flamboyant and taunting thing to say about all of this," my husband lamented, grinning. He scooted Kyoko higher on his chest and smiled at her, blinked at her, imitated her gestures. She let out a shrill infant belly laugh, that tiny reflection of his own mirth.   
"Never fear," Hatori rumbled from his nearby office, "I have sedatives in injection form. All I need is a clear shot at the back of his neck. One of you should distract him while the other runs the opposite direction with the baby." Impassively, he continued about the writing of prescriptions for various family members. I detected that incredibly dry smile of jest tugging at the corner of his lips, which one not familiar with Ha'ri would, in a state of disturbance and terror, miss altogether. It was amusing.  
I laughed again, and the dry little smirk grew just a bit on Ha'ri's face.   
"All the same," Shigure sighed, "we ought to let everyone, even Aaya, have another gander at our little hotaru soon."   
"Firefly, eh?" I lifted the drooling, gurgling bundle off my husband's chest. "Butterfly, I'd say."  
"Why not both?" He reached over and smoothed Kyoko's wild wavy black head. She found his nearest finger tasty. "And carnivorous."  
"Both is good." I cradled her. "A family meeting. I shall request one at once." My chest felt leaden suddenly. "I have yet to speak to two family members about…about fixing things…"  
Gure-ko snorted. "Aaya doesn't care about the past, he and Mine are conspiring to make you an entire feminine wardrobe…"  
"I didn't mean Ayame," I croaked, pressing my lips to Kyoko's little head…feeling courage from that touch between us. "I meant Yuki…and Kyo."  
No response from either my husband or doctor. Shigure rolled over on his side, and Hatori's office chair creaked as he returned to his paperwork.   
I could sense their disquiet, and their hesitation, with my endless quest to atone to all the cursed cousins. I knew they felt that now that Kyoko was born, and everyone loved her, I should leave buried pains buried. But that felt far too easy, a bandaid over the cut, rather than the necessary cleansing of its deepest recesses. I would finish what I had started.  
With that in mind, the next day I myself telephoned each and every Jyunishi. I was a little embarrassed by my own timidity, so unlike my demanding nature of the past, but part of me felt this might be just what was needed to coax my family back into trusting me. The euphoria of the past two days was out of my system and I realized that, for Kyoko, I needed to maintain a harmonious relationship with everyone, and that the road towards this goal was still long.   
A slightly protracted conversation with Kagura over with, I thought on dialing Yuki, hand trembling with the paper full of phone numbers on it. I got through two digits before chickening out and hanging up. Damn it.   
Ayame. Perfect. I would send the message via Ayame. I dialed Shigure's flamboyant best friend.   
"Pleasures R Us!" a reedy baritone warbled at me. "A-HA.HA.HA. Just kidding! Sohma Ayame speaking!"   
I almost hung up again. I also began to consider the possibility that Yuki was adopted into that freak show family. Oh well. "Ahm…Ayame-san? This is Akito…"  
"OH, AKITO-SAMA, WHAT A SPECTACULAR SURPRISE!" The sound of rummaging in the background. "MINE, OUR LATEST PROJECT, MY DEAR COUSIN AND HEAD OF HOUSE, IS ON THE LINE! Yes, THAT Akito! O CREATURE OF FINE BONES AND FAIR IVORY SKIN, AND EYES LIKE EMERALDS, O BEAUTIFUL PORCELAIN FLOWER ONLY RECENTLY PLUCKED BY THE JOYS OF RECOGNIZING HER WOMANHOOD, O BEAT OF MY DEAR SHIGURE'S IMPASSIONED HEART…"  
I felt ill. "Ayame, pardon me, but I didn't call to solicit clothes just yet…"  
"It's alright to admit you gained a few pounds from the pregnancy, Akito-sama," a chirping female voice, that of Ayame's longtime girlfriend Mine, fizzled into the receiver. "We can tailor the high school girl uniform we were making you to wear for Shigure-san…"  
Dear God. "What? No no! I …might I speak to Ayame alone for a moment?"  
Considerable rustling on the other end. Silence. Finally, after a theatrical clearing of his throat, in which, rolling my eyes, I envisioned Ayame tossing his mane of silvery white hair and lovingly cupping his cordless phone, my Snake rumbled, "Why…why Akito-san….what-E-ver IS plaguing your dear young heart?"  
Count to ten. "Aaya-kun, I'm just calling to invite all the relatives back to see Kyoko sometime next week, and I was wondering if y…" I gulped. "Gomen…eh…if you would extend the invitation to Yuki-kun?"  
The pause that followed only caused me further unease.   
"….Aaya-kun?"  
"We are more alike than you realize, Akito-san. Or…at the very least, I am more complicit in the things you once did to my little brother than I am ordinarily willing to admit."  
I felt suddenly as though I were having another pregnant hot flash from the alarm of such gravity in tone and subject, coming from Ayame. I even yelped, causing Shigure to glance around the hall where I stood holding the telephone. I shook my head at him and mustered a reassuring smile, and he winked, then vanished back into the kitchen with a drooling and giggling Kyoko.  
"…Akito-san?" Now, apparently, it was Ayame's turn to feel insecure in my presence.  
"Y…yes, I'm here." But what do I say? I bit my lip and dug my nails, what was left after I had cut them to the quick, into my palms.  
Hatori had once told me that there was more substance to my most colorful cousin than he usually allowed others to see. Hatori told me that Aaya had made our Dragon into his hero for possessing all the things that the Snake lacked.  
I had never realized that among those things he wished he had was filial devotion…but then I remembered all the times, when I had shackled Yuki to a room I had painted all black, that he had feebly trudged up to Ayame, coughing, pale, clammy, clutching at Aaya's colorful kimono, begging him to take him away from the prison I had created... the same scene between the brothers, at every tea, festivity, or family gathering I had ever demanded. A horrible deja-vu of rejection, for, each time, Aaya, who smelled like cherry blossoms and fresh linen, whipped his fresh, clean scented hair over his shoulder, smiled a little forcedly, patted Yuki's head as though Yuki were sweet but troublesome, and continued strolling on the opposite direction. I remembered Shigure's look of blank, self-preservational numbness, and Hatori's look of gruff concern, both towards Yuki, those times as well.   
And when Yuki reached out to his mother, and begged to be taken home, and away from me, the sound of flesh smacking flesh, as her hand streaked down across his cheek, became habitual as well.   
When I was a little girl and witnessed these exchanges, it reminded me of how my mother pulled her oil slick hair away from me that time in the hallway, then smashed a vase into my head.   
Yet instead of pitying Yuki, I had always become vexed and possessive seeing my Rat fussed over by the two Mabudachi who were not his siblings, when he was no different from I, when my mother, too, had abandoned me. I would often pitch tantrums, shoo them out, physically clutch to Yuki, and then berate him fiercely for having an asthma attack or coughing spell in my presence.  
The silence continued to stretch, now, as my eyes became hot and prickly and wet, as I remembered being so full of rage that God's most beloved servant, the Rat, was an ill and frail little boy, that I made calculated, cruel psychological rapes of Yuki…digging, plunging, raking for the most agonizing of verbal chastisements, the most doubt-inflicting "casual" remarks. Worthless, I had called Yuki. Weak. Stupidly optimistic. I had murdered his hope time after time, had told him that he was forever banished to my self-inflicted "black world."  
Black world? It needed to be erased. It had always been my mother's lie to me, her jealous legacy. Jealousy. What a destructive force it was. It had been jealousy that had made me hate Tohru for so long. It had been jealousy that had made me hoard my Juunishi, and inflict innumerable crimes on them. I had to erase this. Yes. Kyoko and her cousins would not know this black world. I would obliterate it. Cleanse the slate. Make it pure and white with hope and possibility once more.  
"Ayame," I breathed, my voice becoming louder as I gained control over my tears, "don't be hard on yourself. We learn and we do better."  
"Oh, but Akito-san…he is so forgiving now, and it makes me feel even worse…when he comes down from university on the weekends to see Mine and me…just so polite and passive and kind…"  
"I know. I know, that is Yuki. But we won't abuse and take that for granted anymore."  
"…No. Akito-san, you have some idea of how to fix all this…"  
"I…I do. Perhaps. But I won't force him. Never again, you understand? I won't force him."  
"Nor I." Again Ayame cleared his throat, and as if a candy coated curtain were flung down over his more raw self, there the peacockish, clownish strut had returned. "At any rate! DO gab, Akki-san! DO, I simply RELISH being proactive and all!"  
I chuckled softly, sniffling, understanding his need for self-protective habits—but for a moment, Ayame the Snake had allowed me a privileged view of his heart, and I would cherish that opportunity, always. And I felt like a little child again, wiping my nose with the back of my arm. Perhaps having a child meant recalling what childhood was like…or should be. "There is a particular room in the back of Main House where I once slept as a child, and…and then where…where Yuki stayed, too, often…because of me."  
"…ah… yes. That room." He laughed uneasily. "Akito-san, perhaps…"  
"Please hear me out. All I want is for Yuki to help me repaint the room in red, blue, and yellow, you know, really bright colors, because I'm making it Kyoko's nursery."  
"OH!" He bellowed it with such dramatic force that my eardrum was probably ruptured, and in any case, I nearly dropped the phone. "OH AKKI-SAN! DOOO YOU THINK IT WILL WORK? OH HOW JOYOUSLY SYMBOLIC, HOW DELICIOUSLY REDEMPTIVE!"  
"I er." Count to ten. Again. "Yes, I…hope so."  
"OH FOR THE CHANCE TO WATCH HIM LIFT THE QUIVERING BRUSH TO THAT BLACK CANVAS OF GLOOM, AND SHED UPON IT RAYS OF JOY…AND…JOYNESS! ALL FOR OUR PRECIOUS LITTLE KYOKO-CHAN, A-HAAA-HAAA-HAAA!"  
"Aaya, my ears hurt." The fizzle of an extension on my end picked up, and there my husband, whom I am beginning to consider omniscient in all matters related to my well-being, smoothly seized the conversation. "O Aaya of my heart, o serpent of my bosom, do recall to pass my dear wife's message along to Yuki-kun!"  
With a deep relieved breath, I hung up the receiver just as I heard Ayame erupt in more trumpeting laughter and chiding Shigure for ever doubting that he would forget.  
Even though he had probably forgotten the message already.  
But I had planted the seed, and now I had only to wait until the next week, to see who would appear.  
The day of visitation arrived. And so did everyone that I invited—everyone except Yuki. When I asked point-blank, Ayame declared, boisterously to conceal his flustered state, that Yuki had an overwhelming calculus exam and regretted being unable to attend. And when I pointed out that it was a Saturday, Aaya only laughed harder and louder, tugged at his embroidered red shirt collar, and pretended to be fascinated with the design of Kyoko's little kimono.   
Mine and Shigure exchanged flat expressions, and then, sweetly, Aaya's longtime girlfriend squeezed my hand. "He really was busy this weekend," she ventured.  
"Yuki-kun is always so studious," Tohru, who had been standing nearby with Kyo, added, quite transparently nervous about my disappointment.   
I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, trying to muster an apologetic smile for her, feeling so sorry that she felt hostage to her need to please the people she loved—particularly undeserving people, like me. "It's alright," I croaked, over the happy crowd-hum of chatting, bantering, and laughing Sohmas.  
"He's rude, that's what," Kyo snarled, crushing his soda-can in a fist. His face went red, and his garnet eyes went tangerine. "Every time I try an' get along with that arrogant, reclusive little bastard…"  
"I think you're both doing admirably these days," I interjected, feeling my smile growing. "And I really do appreciate it. I have been no help in the past in downplaying the necessity that the Rat and Cat be at odds."  
"…Didn't really have much to do with you," the orange-haired boy mumbled, face redder still as he shoved his hands in his pockets and gazed down at me. "I didn't know you when the whole Cat Room prison thing was bein' put together. You didn't sell me off to it. My…my DAD did. Not Shishou…the OTHER guy. The biological guy. Parents…they kinda...hold us hostage sometimes…"   
He shrugged, squinted at me as though gauging how much I could grasp of his circuitous self-expression. Oh, very much indeed. Something caught in my throat. I inhaled hoarsely, and nodded. Kyo hesitated at the empathetic but fragile noise. So I placed my hands on my hips to convey some modicum of the Head's strength and solidity. I hoped it would give my Cat a feeling of security while confiding in me.  
Kyo indeed continued. "And… and we grow up wanting things parents didn't give us…and that damn Yuki actually said he envied my home life…"  
Then he cleared his throat, while Tohru, in her yellow lace dress, touched his shoulder. She looked shocked that he was speaking to me, or perhaps anyone but herself, so openly.  
Then our Rice Ball looked at me a bit helplessly, biting her lip. There was a request for action in her wide ingénue eyes.  
A pause. But no, it was my time to act.  
"I understand that." I took a cautious step closer. "I understand. You are mad because Yuki did not seem at first to realize…about your biological father's…claims…and your…your mother. I understand how it feels when one parent berates and ridicules you, while the other…rather kills you with kindness…and expectations that are not yours…"  
I thought on what Tohru had told me of Kyo's mother. How the woman had pretended to not be afraid of her son, and how her dishonesty and sheltering had wounded him, when she had left him in suicide. "I won't let anyone see you because I love you so much," she had told him, checking his beads as many as two dozen times a day.   
My father had done much the same thing to me, has set me up for disappointment in my life and in the people that I loved and trusted, by telling me the comforting lie he had told himself—that no one would ever leave me, that I was special and entitled, that all who knew me would love me.   
A sweet and destructive lie.   
"I have learned that I really DO understand you, Kyo, and Yuki too. You are not monsters, or disappointments, you are simply human. Just like everyone in this room… and…If I could go back in time and more usefully take away your pains…"  
Kyo's head jerked to the side and he swallowed loudly. "Well, that's life," he forced through bared teeth. After Tohru touched his arm again, he eyed me peripherally, and added, "But thanks just the same." The soda can creaked in his grasp again.  
"It doesn't have to be ALL that life is about," I murmured. I took a bowl of soup from the refreshment table that the maids had set up, and handed it to him. I grinned. "For starters…at great pains, I have mandated that leeks be omitted from the soup we serve today!"   
"How charitable, A-Chan." Saki Hanajima flowed—truly, flowed is the only word to describe her graceful Victorian vampire gestures—up to our huddle, causing Kyo to jump. "I sensed dempa waves indicating such culinary sacrifices before I even walked through the door. Hmm. Animal crackers."  
"Thank you," I chuckled, "I thought so." Animal crackers. My first conversation with a Sohma who had forgiven me, Kisa, had been about animal crackers.   
Damn. That girl was GOOD.  
Strange, yes. But good.  
And it was rather funny how much Saki always freaked out my unflappable husband. Arisa told me of a New Year's Eve when Saki cleaned the first floor bathroom of Shigure's old house and terrorized him so much with a single dark expression that he went outside and pissed in the bushes rather than face her wrath. Uo and I had laughed for perhaps a solid half hour at this mental image, while Kureno and my husband peered at us quizzically from the adjoining tea room.  
Presently, Kyo rolled his eyes at Saki. A smile slowly crept up his face as he took the bowl. "Arigato, Akito-sama." Ah, and there I saw in those fiery garnet eyes a trace of the softness, the fond loyalty, that must have so enchanted Tohru these past several years.   
"You are welcome. I should like it if you and I talked more often, Kyo-kun."  
"I think I can swing that."  
"Excellent. No more Cat vs. Rat bets. No more confinement chambers. No more animosity on my part. This whole 'the Cat is an outcast' business is pure bullshit anyway."  
Tohru jumped at my colorful language. "Erm…"  
"Bullshit." Kyo toasted me with his soup bowl. "A-freakin'-men. Damn, you know, I still remember bein' shocked as all hell when I saw ya at Shishou's after telling him there was no more Cat Room."  
"That was when I bestowed upon A-Chan her nickname," Saki droned, smiling distantly.  
I sighed. The name was sticking, apparently. A-Chan. Heh.  
Kyo snorted. "Yeah, whatever. Here's to bullshit!"  
Tohru jumped again. "Kyo, oh dear…" She fanned her face.  
I laughed, sliding an arm around our Rice Ball. I squeezed her, and let go. "Oh, I was more nervous than you will ever realize, Kyo-kun. Yes, amen. Good, good."  
A snappish female voice interrupted us. "Good? Why GOOD, talking to this loud-mouthed asshole?"  
Poor Tohru, she jumped again.   
The sound of stiletto boots clomping on the mats and there in her Goth goddess glory stood my Horse, Isuzu, brandishing a sketchbook and threateningly sharp pencil.  
"EXCUSE me?" Kyo roared at the new arrival.  
"Oh dear," Tohru mumbled.  
"Stop bellowing, Kyon-Kyon," Saki crooned.  
"DON'T CALL ME THAT, you freakin' PSYCHO."   
"Psychic, actually." She smiled wanly.  
Etched across her lovely pale face, Isuzu's impatience grew like mildew on something hot, dark and wet.  
My smile grew wobbly with nerves. "Ah er…that is…Rin-san, welcome…"  
"Oh shut up, all of you," my Horse grunted, exuding jitters as she cast rapid, nervous looks down at me through her obsidian eyes. "I came by to sketch the kid like you asked, Akito-san."  
Oh my God.   
My jaw dropped. "OH. I…think she's over with Kureno and Arisa right now…" My eyes roved the room desperately, my heart deafening me.  
Nearby Shigure erupted into wicked cackles as Kyoko spat up on Kureno's best blue dress shirt. Arisa Uotani shot my husband a calculated murderous look, and a fist-pummeling-to-palm gesture. He quickly sobered, waving sheepishly back.  
"Oh good grief," Rin growled, stomping over in that direction. Something gave her pause, and, shoulders hunched, she turned back to face me. "What are you gonna do with it, anyway?"  
"I want to hang it in her bedroom," I beamed. "Yuki is going to repaint the room that will soon be hers, and I wanted you to decorate it too…or I can put it someplace more prominent, if you like…"  
Rin looked truly shocked. "Some dumb little doodle by ME?"  
"It is neither dumb nor little as far as I am concerned," I replied, bowing slightly to her. "It is a precious piece of your spirit, Rin-sensei."  
I spotted Tohru nodding emphatically, in my peripheral vision.  
Rin's face has been blossoming open, startled, and even a little gentle, but then it darkened again. "Don't c-call me SENSEI, I don't deserve that title!" she half-roared.  
I blinked. "Oh, yes, well, that is…"  
"SHUT UP!" Looking ready to either cry or faint, my Horse turned on her heel with a mare-worthy snort, and shoved three shorter cousins out of the way in her path to Kureno and Kyoko.   
As Kureno handed our precious daughter over to my husband, Shigure assumed that cold, enigmatic smile that always warns the trained eye that he is very angry. What I, once again, have coined his "pissed-off smile." He leaned very close to Rin, and whispered something in her ear. She stiffened, shrugged viciously, and opened her sketchbook. She nearly stabbed the paper with her pencil.   
Kyoko gurgled and smiled at her.  
Kureno winced and ambled over to us. He smiled crookedly and pointed to Kyoko's spit-up. "Your daughter has exacted vengeance upon me." He laughed softly.  
"What did he say to her?" I murmured, trying not to sound too tense as I cut him off.  
"Cheese cubes," Saki inexplicably purred.  
We all stared at her.  
Kyo looked like he was ready to say something rude.  
Kureno thankfully recovered first, and quietly replied, "He pointed out that Hatsuharu still called him 'sensei,' but that the title was obsolete. Then he said that it was even worse to cling to obsolete feelings, like bitterness and unforgiveness."  
I groaned. "Oh Gure-ko. This requires time, has he forgotten that?"   
"It will all work out, Akito-chan." Kureno smiled, turning again to his shirt stain. "We have stain sticks for all kinds of things, after all."  
"Alcohol swabs," drawled Saki.  
Kyo rolled his eyes.  
"Ah, yes, Hanajima-san," Kureno politely replied.  
"You need them still. But just a little bit yet. Things are almost cleansed." Saki was looking only at me, and I noticed only after Shigure and Kyoko had rejoined us, and he hand placed her in my arms. I yelped quietly when I found her nose an inch from my own.  
Kyoko shrieked happily and grabbed a handful of wavy black psycho…er psychic… hair.   
"You said you needed them for your family. Alcohol swabs. For your family and yourself. You are doing a good job with alcohol swabs," Saki insisted.  
I thought perhaps I understood what she meant. "Thank you," I breathed.  
That night, without hesitating, without going through Ayame, I called Yuki. He answered. I asked him to come the next morning to repaint the Black Room. And he finally accepted.

Shigure and I place Kyoko's crib in her soon-to-be room the next afternoon. We opened all the doors and placed her near a window, where she could watch Yuki working.   
He came in wearing his backpack on the front of him, like a shield, and with his nose buried in a physics textbook. Only when I spoke his name did he put the textbook, and the bookbag, down next to Kyoko. She blinked and cooed.  
Mildly agonizing, but endurable, nervousness pervaded the room when Shigure warmed Yuki up with their usual exchange of quips and calm, good-natured insults. My panic only began to set in after my husband kissed my forehead and left the room.   
No more buffers.  
No more lies.  
Yuki stared directly at me. His lavender eyes were breathtaking, large like a child's. They impassively accepted the monster that I had been, and, to him, still was, while maintaining a wary vigil. I recalled being obsessed with those eyes, that alabaster skin, that silken silver hair, that frail body—not because I wanted him sexually, or romantically, no, it was worse than that, it was because he was MINE in my sick mind, and I wanted to possess him, and let no one else near him. I had wanted Yuki for my testimonial that my "Eternal Bond" with the Jyuunishi was vibrant, to defy my mother and her claims that I was worthless, for the Rat, the Rat was God's most devoted servant.   
I had been very much like asthma to Yuki, when we were children.   
And so I just stared back. Suddenly any kind of greeting felt pretentious. "Um." He was taller than me. Much. I had never noticed it before. I had always been able to stand on a chair, or a step, or a bed, and be a little taller than him, before. "I…am not very good at this. I thought I'd try to help, just the same."  
"We'll work on it with time," Yuki scientifically observed, as he picked up a brush and a bucket. He continued to stare at me.  
Kyo gurgled uncertainly. She reached for the brush.  
I moved quickly to stop her. Yuki dodged instinctively, knocking over two paint cans with loud clangor. His ears turned a delicate hue of pink.  
Kyoko began to cry. I picked her up and rocked her. "I was…talking about the paint, for the moment…sorry to startle you…"  
"So was I. It's alright." But he said it so hastily that I wondered if he were being entirely forthright. He sighed. There wasn't exactly anger in his voice. More like tired, indulgent despair for me, as though he half-believed this to all be a charade. "Look, Akito-san, could we just set about this task? I have lots of physics and literature homework to do this weekend, particularly since I am taking Machi out to dinner on Saturday night." It reminded me of Rin's reception of my efforts so far, only so much kinder, and, thus, so much more painful for us both. I wanted to scream at him to just once raise his voice against me. To be rude, just once, and selfish. To call me a bitch—and watch me say nothing cruel or derisive in return. Anything to show him the days of terror were over.   
I put Kyoko back in her crib. "Of course. I'd like to focus on the primary colors, maybe some secondary ones, but all bright, you know? Hatori said that bright colors would stimulate cerebral activity….Machi is sweet and shy, like you." I pulled a rubber band from around my wrist and tied back my hair at the nape of my neck. "You being the former prince of Kaibara High School, I'm sure you learned many tricks of charming ladies. The two of you…both shy and overachieving…you would understand and give to each other often…that's awfully symbiotic isn't it? It's much more rewarding to give AND receive in a relationship. I finally learned that."  
"…it is."  
I fidgeted with my ponytail. "I hope you two have fun…"  
"Your hair looks pretty like that, Akito. Longer, I mean." Yuki knelt down and mixed yellow into the green on top of the painting tarp, warming it, warm like his voice. Yuki was my mirror opposite. Where illness and pain had hardened me, it had softened him. His voice, his gestures, his intentions. To this day, there are few in my family that I admire more than him.   
I nodded, studied the exposed carpet, brushing its bristly grains sideways, and it somehow managed to tickle the bottom of my calloused foot. "And…I like your hair too." For so many years, I had forced him to conform to every standard I had set—undermined his confidence, made him mistrust his every individual judgment. I had even made him wear my identical hairstyle…and so this exchange of compliments…it was not so shallow as it sounded.   
"Yuki," with my courage swelling for a precious instant, I tried to broach the topic, "I know that….about two years ago today, when you sat with me at the New Year's Banquet, you said you forgave me for…for all those…awful things that I did to you, b-but…" My lips produced a trembling smile to his face, shrouded in a curtain of silver-gray bangs. "Ahah…listen to me, I'm stuttering…"  
"I am listening to you." He sounded so young and so afraid, suddenly. Two slender arms hugged that nearly concave, frail torso, and he dropped the yellow-sodden brush onto the floor. Yuki was the only member of my family who had ever been thinner than me.   
It killed me. "Oh! Oh, no no, that wasn't a command or anything…! Let me explain, please…"  
"I can't. Akito, I will shatter. You took me into this horrible room again, even if to repaint it in color. I have done that much for your baby." He pointed at Kyoko, who looked like she was going to cry again. "Please, I can't do more." Wheezes punctuated his powder-soft words, and he covered his mouth to hide it as he turned to escape me.   
"Yuki, your asthma." I seized his shoulders, teetering forward with him, hugging each of his arms from behind. My eyes fell closed. "Your asthma. Sweet boy, don't be afraid to show you're sick, I…I won't scold you for coughing anymore. I won't say another word. I will finish the room by myself, you can leave the moment you feel better…Please, Yuki, just calm down now." I loosened my grip slightly when I heard his panicked gasping hastening.   
I am not sure how long I held him there before his breathing returned to normal, and he leaned back.   
Against me.   
It had to mean something. Maybe it meant he was taking my word. I mustn't disappoint him. I sprang up. "…Hold still, I will find your inhaler. Point to where you saw it last."   
At that moment, Kyoko kicked something shiny and metallic out of her crib, with a loud sob. The inhaler. Yuki had apparently dropped it there, from his pocket.  
I rushed to take it, and the strangest thing happened: The moment I picked it up, my baby began to smile, and laugh, and kick her tiny legs again. I gazed down at her in awe and was again powerfully reminded of the spirit of my loving and sheltering father Akira living on in her person. As ever, my daughter made me brave again. I handed Yuki his inhaler and braced him.  
He took a deep breath of it, and color slowly returned to his cheeks.  
"…Better?" I watched him, a hand on his shoulder. "Don't talk—just nod."  
After a moment, gazing at me out of the corner of his eye, he nodded once.   
I helped him to stand. Kyoko whimpered again. And it came to me. "Yuki, you know, I've really been trying to fix things with everybody, but…in this case…I am doing this for myself, not you. To assuage my guilt. I've put you out, socially and with your homework, to come do me this favor. It is no different than I ever was before."  
A hoarse sound escaped his throat. Graciously, my Rat shook his head and took my hands. He nodded at the paint, as if to indicate continuing.   
I sighed and smiled. "No. You should go."  
Yuki looked frustrated. He scrambled to his bookbag and drew a pen and legal pad from it. He scribbled rapidly and handed it to me.  
I bit my lip. "I know that you really do forgive me. And I know that you think that if you give into this discomfort, being around me, right away, that it will mean you've regressed. I KNOW you want to move forward, my dear motivated, studious, industrious Yuki." I chuckled softly, fondly. I picked up Kyoko again, and kissed her forehead before resuming. "So do I. But we must take baby-steps, Yuki. You yourself once said that was the only way to do better."  
He seized back the writing pad, fiercely, and I smiled gently to myself because he had no idea how much braver he was around me, how unthinkable it would have been for him to so openly defy me even a year ago. Kyoko reached for it and chewed and drooled on the edge of it.  
Yuki wrote again.  
I read it. "Yes. I did speak to your brother about you. And yes. I remember when we first met and were very young. I do remember crying a lot. I never stopped crying, though."  
Yuki gave a silent laugh, cocking an eyebrow empathetically. Another sentence scratched down.  
I read it again. "You too huh? Brave boy. Yes I remember your mother. How is she? Dreadful I hope. She and my mother should have tea and exchange noxious anti-maternal sentiments sometime."  
More silent laughter. More writing.  
More reading. "You're welcome, Yuki. No more favoritism or hazing. You are another cousin whom I love. These aren't just words. I will give you time to believe them, but you will see. You will see."  
He resumed staring at me. Now he was smiling, and it was feather soft and genuine. His eyes shifted to the door, to escape, but he forced them back on me, and continued to smile.   
Kyoko googled. She turned to me and burrowed into my shirt. I resisted the powerful urge to ask Yuki to stay, such a calming presence he had always been. Peaceful and attentive, the perfect sidekick. The perfect slave. And I would never make him a slave again.  
"Go," I said. "Please. Go. It is alright. Yuki, I think the most important thing I can give you right now is my absence. I will never intrude again. I will see you whenever YOU wish it. Now, go. This is the most beautiful shade of green that I have ever seen. I think I shall paint the entire west wall in just this color. Arigato."  
Yuki squeezed my hands so tightly that I thought he'd crush them. His face spoke volumes.  
I had never imagined him to be so… "Strong." I voiced it softly but clearly, smiling up at him. "You are so strong, Yuki. You know, I always heard how you were the weak Sohma, frail, forever serving others before yourself. I believed it until Tohru really broke through to me…when I saw what people like you, and she, and Kureno…and my father…and, I am beginning to think, my Kyoko… are like. How your sweetness and charity give you the strength to really live. Momiji told me that I am to cherish you from now on." I nodded. "Yes, and I will. Now, go."  
He nodded. His eyes were bright and moist. I wanted to embrace him, but I didn't dare. I let him pick up his bookbag. I let him turn his back to me. I let him wave over his shoulder, and walk out.  
I let him go.   
And I had never felt so good and so brave, and so decent, myself, at watching someone leave me.   
Leave me.  
My gift to Yuki was letting him go free. With no setbacks. Fully free.  
In time, he would return. On his own terms. And it would be a beautiful homecoming.


	10. My Cat's Acceptance: Part I

Not My Mother's Hair:

A Series of Vignettes from the Diary of Akito Sohma

A Fruits Basket/Furuba Fanfiction by Amber Stitt

**DISCLAIMER:** **WARNING, MANGA SPOILERS AFTER CHAPTER 98 IN THE DISCLAIMER! "Fruits Basket/Furuba" in its anime and manga formats are the creation and property of Takaya Natsuki and I in NO WAY claim ownership or profit thereof.**

**In this fanfiction, which will be comprised of SEVERAL SHORT CHAPTERS, Akito Sohma's gender is FEMALE, in correspondence with MANGA CANON POST-CHAPTER-98. The story depends HEAVILY on the MANGA as opposed to the anime. **

**This story takes place AFTER THE EVENTS OF CHAPTER 131 OF THE MANGA: Therefore the Sohmas are FREE from the Zodiac Curse and Akito is no longer dying. **

**While I will probably never have time to revise this story, PLEASE ENJOY, R&R! **

**Chapter 10: My Cat's Acceptance**

**Part I **

_Clinging  
Dreaming  
Against a rough cliff  
Whisper the wind  
Blowing ferocity to the core  
Gales and gusts  
Blows on that branch  
It clings to its uncertain hold  
It feels every bite  
It tastes each flake  
Brushing, trusting on the next day  
Yet still, it grows.  
Stubbornly it flourishes.  
Salt and sea  
Rain and storm  
Shine the sun, praise the Spring.  
I am strong_

_I have good root.  
I grow as I will,  
Because I have endured.  
I am bonsai. _

--Lucinda Langley

The room was huge, voluminous, a void save fourteen ceiling-high wood cabinets, which were themselves full to the brim with secret treasures.

It was a room that I had been constructing for my family for over six months. It was a secret. I could not sleep that night, so I slipped in the room to marvel at the potential healing that could come of it.

"Darling oksama, this is an overkill."

I spun on my heel, barefoot, to scowl at my husband, who was being his usual, annoyingly perceptive and observant self. My frown immediately dissolved at the sight of our now one-year-old daughter wriggling in my sleep-disheveled Shigure's arms, reaching for me.

"Mama!" she trilled, with a smile that would melt the polar icecaps. Her eyes, large orbs of hazel, were joyful, inviting. How I loved her.

I slunk from the large dark room, that balmy 3 am night, with a guilty smile, pulling Kyoko against my breast. She nestled comfortably against the skin of my neck and chest. For many weeks now, my mortification at showing any skin aside that of my hands, feet, and face has dissolved, as though my sense of vulnerability and fragility have been banished. That night, then, I was wearing only my coral floral nightrobe, tied loosely at the chest and waist. "Sorry if you were calling me, butterfly," I apologized gently into her tiny ear. "I was getting the special room ready."

"As I said," Gure-ko murmured in a smiling voice, loping into the space, "an overkill. But an admirable madness, my love. Dear God, how tasty you smell, like rosewater and freshbaked bread."

"I'm edible?"

"Most assuredly." His smile was a little wicked, a little dark, as he glanced over his shoulder at me.

I felt my cheeks go hot. "Shut up, you."

"Shupp-oo!" Kyoko giggled an imitation of my flushed words.

"Oh, dear," I mumbled, amazed at her intelligence—and blushing deeper still.

"Redddd," Kyoko snickered, patting my cheeks with two chubby little hands.

"Your father's child," I mused, kissing her forehead.

She stuck out her tongue at her daddy, giggled winsomely, and snuggled against me again.

"And her mother's," he chuckled smokily, while peering fully in one of the big cabinets. "What's this? Drawing tablets?…Isuzu." He blinked, cocking his head to the side and peering at the cabinet door.

Like all the other cabinets, it had a wooden handle carved crudely in the shape of an animal of the Zodiac—in this case, a horse.

Shigure moved swiftly about the room now, fingers caressing each grotesque attempt at an animal. "Sheep, Ox… for Ha'ri a Dragon instead of a sea-horse, how sweet…Snake, Monkey, Rat, Tiger, Boar…Rooster…DOG! And with a butterfly sitting on the dog's head, for our Kyoko…Rabbit…even Cat…and Rice Ball." He fell silent while staring at Tohru's cabinet.

I had gone to great pains to hide the blisters and sores on my hands from my amateurish attempts, with a pocketknife of Hatsuharu's, at customizing the fourteen vessels that I had clandestinely purchased. It had taken many months, and even Shigure had not known what I was doing for hours in this room.

Now my husband's gray-brown eyes flickered keenly over my hands, and my face.

"You're incredible," he breathed, so intensely that it staggered me, and it was one of those rare times when Shigure was being utterly serious.

I suddenly felt like crying, though not in sorrow, and didn't know why. "I just thought that it might make sense to change the Cat's Room into a room where…well…they might all find a source of ….solace…gifts from me." I stuttered—while Kyoko, happily off-key, clapped and sang "red, red, red, red face." "Gifts that I know symbolize their favorite things in the world. Gifts I want to give them. Always."

"The greatest gift I see from you here, towards the Jyuunishi, is your acceptance." Shigure's smile was quiet, simmering with that subtle but frighteningly zealous adoration of his. "You are at the very brink of your goal, my love."

"You think so?"

"I do. Now come to bed. Remember we go shopping with Rin and Kazuma tomorrow."

My heart plummeted to my stomach. "Oh, yes. Sleepytime, hotaru."

Kyoko was already dozing in my arms. I smiled and marveled at the fact that, after hundreds of diaper changings and temper tantrums, she was still so perfectly magical and miraculous to me.

My strength.

"You know, Gure-ko…" I mumbled it at my husband's lean, firm back.

"Hmm?" So coquettish, so flirty and childlike, was his whimsy as he turned over his shoulder to smile at me once more. Catch me if you can, that puckish face of his seemed to sing. Like ripples on water, Hatori had said of my forever mate. No, I had thought, when he had said this. No, Shigure was more like a placid, twinkling twilight lake surface, underneath which roiled a whitewater rapid of passion. And he was mine.

It was this sweet conclusion that had made me pause with concern. "Shigure," I said his full name now, signaling the gravity of the topic.

Sharp as ever, he turned to face me fully. The lake surface rippled. "What, I said?"

"I never really made a concerted effort to apologize to YOU. Perhaps if I…"

"_Don't_." The force of his tone surprised me, as he placed a warm finger on my lips. "When you put on that kimono I gave you, and kissed me, everything was erased. We are never going to discuss this again. You belong to me now, and that is all I ever wanted. Do you hear me?"

I looked up into my husband's face, while our child dozed in my arms. Sometimes Shigure truly frightened me, with his sudden, violent expressions—with his face alone. Not for my own safety, but for his ever-elusive inner peace. Beneath the calculated façade of buffoonery, he was the most obsessive, restless person, privately, that I had ever known—besides myself.

Right now, his eyes, under his wavy, bohemian tangle of coal black bangs, oscillated between a crystalline, amber-brown hue and a cold, murky, foglike gray. They were conflicted like his soul. People often pegged my husband's eyes as one of the two colors, or even as hazel, for the gray sometimes resembled a mossy green in tricky lighting. But I knew they were both gray and brown, depending on the moment. Icy and hot, careless and staggeringly intense, like him. So, though my soul was still troubled for my part in our equal hurt of each other, years and years before, I played along, and strove to allow him that peace which he needed.

"I said, do you hear me?" he whispered.

"I hear you. I was just trying to decide how I managed to get exactly what I wanted as well." My smile was shaky with grateful emotion. "You. Stupid husband that I love. I am blessed more than I deserve."

"Good." And all of a sudden, he was my casual, glittering imp again. "I often have the awe-striking effect on people, oksama, you know that."

I slugged his shoulder gently, putting our daughter to bed and rolling my eyes indulgently as his hands reached inside my robe and found familiar places, pulling me against him.

Home.

Yes, surely I could finish what I started now.

_"In this farewell_

_There's no blood_

_There's no alibi_

_Cause I've drawn regrets_

_From the truth of a thousand lies_

_So let mercy come_

_And wash away_

_What I've done_

_I'll face myself_

_To cross out what I've become_

_Erase myself_

_And let go of what I've done_

_What you've asked_

_What you've thought of me_

_I've cleaned the slate_

_With the hand of uncertainty_

_So let mercy come_

_And wash away_

_What I've done_

_I'll face myself_

_To cross out what I've become_

_Erase myself_

_And let go of what I've done_

_For what I've done_

_I'll start again_

_And whatever pain may come_

_Today this ends_

_I'm forgiving what I've done"_

_--Linkin Park_

Somehow by ten minutes into the market excursion, I had ended up pushing the shopping cart. As fate would have it, I also ended up splitting up from the larger party with Isuzu, and as a result the only sound between us was the unnerving creak of the poorly oiled cart wheels.

To make things worse, we ran into Yuki. My Rat paused to size us both up through his silver-gray bangs. Seeing Rin's obstinate, black-clad, arms-across-chest fury, and perhaps hearing the peculiar hissing sounds coming from between her bared teeth, Yuki actually decided that I, in a baby-drool-stained peasant top and loose Capri jeans, was the preferable company.

"I'm just getting some legal pads for some exam studying," he explained with a careful smile, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear. He strolled over to the side of the cart opposite Rin. "You?"

"Just catching up with Kazuma," I replied, keeping my limbs to myself, trying to be as un-intimidating as possible. I picked up a container of tofu and pretended to be fascinated with the ingredients while I spoke. "He came down from the dojo to see Kyo and Tohru. By the way, Kyo IS with us." My eyes flickered up to convey a point to Yuki: basically, that if he wanted to flee another verbal fisticuffs with my Cat, he might want to jet now.

Yuki obtained an expression of patience that seemed, to me, almost super-human. "I see," he crooned, lip quirking wryly. He was looking past my shoulder.

I turned and my vision was filled with flame orange hair and an even redder face.

Well shit. Too late.

"What the HELL are YOU doin' here?" Kyo nearly bellowed, taking out my left eardrum in the process. "Sorry, Akito," he added, noticing how I cringed.

Rin made a revolted noise in her throat. "Gee, what a lucky girl I am, spending the afternoon in the supermarket with my three favorite people." Her velvet voice was somehow cutting.

Yuki arched an eyebrow, coldly unconcerned. "You're the soul of inertia, aren't you, Rin?"

"What exactly are you implying, you arrogant little ivory-tower prick?" she hissed, rounding the cart towards him, arms hoisted defensively at her sides. In her fluid, lacy black attire, she resembled something remarkably like a raven swooping down on a mouse.

Yuki smiled mirthlessly. He picked up a pack of cellophane-wrapped notecards and some fountain pens, leaning casually across our volatile female cousin. "I mean you're the only one in this family who NEVER changes. I'm giving you a tip, Rin." He poked her in the chest, just below her neck, with the tip of one of the pens. "Change."

My Horse was speechless. Two splotchy red patches bloomed across her pale cheeks. I could not decide whether she was trembling with fury, fear, or pain.

Or all three.

"Being a smartass, more like," Kyo cut in, with a jerky nod, just when I thought matters could not possibly get worse. "You just came out of hiding yourself, Yuki, what gives you the right to lecture the rest of us? We set our own damned pace, got it?"

"I DON'T NEED TO BE DEFENDED BY THE CAT!" Rin exploded. "I DON'T NEED YOUR HELP!"

Heads turned. Far down the aisle, where the baby food and diapers were stocked, Kazuma and Shigure pivoted on the spot. Shigure, my catalyst, my beloved puppet-master husband, hung back, knowing somehow that there were some conflicts that I must face alone. He was holding Kyoko, who was watching no one but me, her mother, the person who was supposed to fix everything, with fixation and faith.

"Please…" I heard my own voice, as though from at the end of a long subterranean tunnel. I was trying, trying so hard, for my daughter, with her endless faith in me. In ME. "Please don't dig up…"

"AW I SEE HOW IT IS!" Kyo erupted, ignoring me, towering over Rin. His rage threatened to burst free like a taut violin string. "Don't forgive, don't forget the grudges, don't forget how FUN it was to feel SUPERIOR to SOMEone, to ME, to the MONSTER!" He jabbed his own chest. "Got a reason to hate everyone, don't you, Rin?"

"YOU should talk!" she screamed. "YOU couldn't even save your own MOTHER from KILLING herself!"

"At least mine wanted to TALK to me!" he roared back.

"The reason why I think you're pathetic has NOTHING to do with the true form you took, you whiny little shitface!"

"Akito," Yuki's quiet, silken voice, the voice of pacifism and reason, somehow pierced the cacophony of hurting, bellowing teenagers. I felt his fingers, thin but warmer than I expected, on my trembling arm. "You should just leave them here."

"How can I?" I gasped. "They'll kill each other!"  
"Your daughter looks upset."

I turned to see Kyoko's face for myself, and it was twisted in that prelude to tears. And it made me angry.

My fist slammed hard onto the handles of the shopping cart; a hollow metallic clang, like a temple gong, sliced through the arguing. "STOP THIS!" For the first time in over two years, I raised my voice against family members. I surged around to face my two cousins castigating each other. "PLEASE! We can't afford to do this! Not now!"

It was at that moment that Shigure, utterly silent, approached, holding our sobbing daughter. She turned her red, tear-streaming face mutinously on the three contenders, as if they had tyrannically caused the very sun to stop shining.

Yuki eyed my husband almost wryly. His lavender eyes conveyed that he perceived precisely what Shigure was doing. But, sidling up to the child and tugging on one of her little toes, he played along.

Kyo jumped back a few paces, his tanned face under his fiery hair looking ashamed. "What?" he mumbled. "Oh. Shoot. Hi, Kyoko."

I was still trying to control my temper. The cart jiggled along with my trembling grasp.

"Here comes the tantrum," Rin breathed. Her onyx eyes, so mistrusting, so resentful, as she eyed me sidelong, were staggering. "I'm going for some air." And she stalked off, and out the sliding doors, to the parking lot.

"N-NO! No…" I gulped, closed my eyes, modulated my voice with great effort. "It's just that you three would have nothing to argue about if it hadn't been for me." My hands now clutched the cart handle, whitening, and I watched the blue veins just beneath my pale, transluscent skin pulsing to the sound of my thundering heart.

A long pause.

Yuki sighed.

Kyo shifted weight; his nylon sweatsuit made an oddly calming, ocean-like swishing sound. "Actually, that's…"  
I stole a glance at them, and to my astonishment they were eyeing each other, as if seeking from each other the right thing to say.

"…it's only partially true," Yuki finished for him, with a nod. "The Cat and Rat were meant to be natural enemies."

"You're wrong!" I snapped, suppressing an urge to viciously kick over the contents of the cart. "They are not! I and my forefathers have just been trying to reinforce that LIE! Your animosity is MY fault! It is an illusion! A DELUSION!" I pinched my nails into my wrist flesh, reminding myself once more to diminish the force of my voice, because my daughter was watching me again.

Another pause.

"No, Akito," Yuki spoke slowly, deliberating each word as it flowed from his tongue. "Perhaps you reinforced it. But we were the ones who chose to listen to you. We were the ones who chose to be jealous of each other, to resent each other. And our parents were the ones who most forced it on us. My mother…Kyo's father…" He took Kyoko from Shigure's arms and held her. She gave a reluctant laugh through her sniffling, reaching for his soft silver-gray hair.

I watched them, gawking, feeling as if I had just watched them sprouting additional green-hued limbs.

"…Yeah." Kyo bit his lip, offering Kyoko a finger to teeth on. "I'm in a bad mood because I ran into my dad at the other side of the store, Akito."

I jolted. "What? But Kazuma is right here," and I gestured at the martial arts master, who had sidled up serenely behind my husband, "with Shigure and Kyoko…"

"No," Kyo muttered. "I mean, the OTHER guy…"

"Your biological father is here?" Kazuma's voice, like the swishing sound of sea grass, carried an unusual note of concern. "What did he say to you?"

"Yes," and my anger coursed through me again, set me afire with purpose and strength. "What DID he say to you, Kyo?"

"Nothing," and Kyo gave a hollow, forced laugh. "That's the sting of it. He said nothing. Just stared at me an' walked on, like I was a piece of gum on blacktop and he was steppin' over me. Drunk again. It's a good thing he's like that. He's worse sober."

I shook my head slowly. I turned to Shigure, who was smiling in that grim, dark way of his when he was thinking something very strongly but keeping it prudently to himself.

Yuki just nodded. "Our parents," was all he said. He handed Kyoko to me. "I guess you know the power you have." He nodded at my daughter. "I guess you'll keep that in mind for the better."

"I will certainly try to, Yuki."

The sound of stiletto heels vengefully beating the linoleum market floor broke our intense study of each other. I was almost afraid to turn around when I smelled some cool floral scent and felt hot, fruit-scented breath on the back of my neck.

"Welcome back, Rin," I managed pathetically.

She cringed at my unthinking use of her familiar name. "I want gelatin," she snapped.

I blinked. "What?"

"You know, jellies. Fruit jellies. And I want a specific flavor. And I want you to find it. Now." I was surprised that her obsidian gaze couldn't peel flesh. Of course, I shouldn't be shocked. This was the same girl who, when I had asked her jokingly if she thought I looked fat when pregnant, had snarled "yes," with the unelaborated bluntness of a two-by-four.

"Er…okay, what flavor?" I complied, trying hard not to sound like I was groveling to my younger female cousin (which I was).

Rin's flawless full lip was a Classically beautiful lip that I honestly envy, like the rest of her young, proportionate face. But right now, it was curled in ill-concealed derision. Even then, it could not make her look ugly, and I wanted to weep that something as exquisite as she had ever been abused by the likes of myself and her cruel parents. Of course, at the moment, I felt far too stupid already to blurt some remark about her magnetic appearance. She might get a very wrong idea.

Finally, she spoke, "I want pomegranate acai jelly."

I think I almost passed out. At least the room tilted. "Um..." was my magnificently profound response. Damn my snow white complexion and the dead giveaway blushes that it harbored.

"Rin," Yuki began, in sheer exasperation.

"Does that even exist?" Kyo grunted. "It sounds like some tree hugging new age crap."

"With which there is nothing wrong," Yuki coolly countered.

Kyo ground his teeth. His canines, even without possession by the Cat Spirit, were still alarmingly long and feline.

Shigure made a quelling canine whine at them both, waving a hand. Then, when Kyo asked brusquely if Shigure had gas, my Dog proffered an overly patient smile at him and pretended to find the various types of spices fascinating. "Parsley, saaage, rosemary and thyyyme," he sang. This provided a tall, trim, baby-wielding barricade between the two boys and the two girls—Rin and me. My husband already understood what was going on, of course. "Oh," Kyo said, finally getting it. Poor Kyo, he was capable of blushes almost as bright as my own.

I recognized a challenge when I saw it, too. And here was what Rin was presenting me—a challenge she was certain I would fail. It would be her queer but unshakable logic that I had disappointed her once again, even with something as miniscule as a jar of jelly. Because that jelly meant so much more—it represented the kind of person who could break Rin's mistrusting walls and reach the Heart of the House which was her namesake. It represented a person like Tohru Honda, who had given Rin jar after jar of jelly during her many ulcer-caused hospital stays.

This was Rin's bizarre way of initiating me into her circle of trust, or disowning me for good.

I could hardly blame her.

I flashed a wobbly smile. "Gure-ko, could you…?"

"Sure," Shigure read me in one keen glance. He plopped Kyoko into Rin's arms. "Play with her. I bet even the devil likes babies." And then he grinned at her like the individual of whom he spoke.

She looked horrified at first, but then an even more startling emotion crossed her face: guilt. She let Kyoko drool on her expensive and angrily black shirt, she let Kyoko yank on her ever-regrowing hair, she let Kyoko shriek and giggle at her enormous eyes. "I bet Ha'ru likes you," she mumbled at my little one, who gurgled as if concurring.

Shigure winked at me. "It's okay," he mouthed.

Snatching the time provided by this decoy, I abandoned the cart and dashed down several aisles. I couldn't think straight, so I forgot to look at aisle labels or numbers. I felt tears springing surprisingly quickly to my eyes, and wiped them away in a fit of self-disgust. I had to keep a grip. This was my last chance.

My legs began to tingle and buckle when I hit the jelly aisle and found that there was in fact a pomegranate acai spread—but the shelf where it was supposed to be was empty.

The first feeling that made my chest heavy and hot was rage—rage at such premeditated rejection by Rin—but then I became twice as furious at myself. I reminded myself, once again, that she had every right to hate me until she drew her last breath. The rage was quickly banished by guilt and despair. I had called Rin "unneeded," but that was not her role at that time, several years ago—it was mine. I was unneeded. It had only been through grace and hard work that I had found a place where I was truly needed, with my Kyoko.

I leaned against the shelf for just a few seconds, clutching the metal ledge, regaining control. I breathed raggedly, heavily. And then it passed, and I began to scour the whole aisle, in search of just a single jar of forgiveness and sufficiency.

It was when I was flailing my arm behind a stack of mayonnaise jars and murmuring aloud to my ancestors to aid me that I felt a tentative tap on my shoulder.

I whirled around.

I would never have expected Kyo to be the type to lightly tap a shoulder. He seemed like the back-smacking type.

But there he was.

Bless him, still blushing the hue of the tomato ketchup bottles near us.

"I ran into a guy from the back," he mumbled, shoving one beautiful wonderful perfect jar of pomegranate acai jelly into my trembling fingers. "They hadn't brought it out yet. I asked him for a jar. Said it was really important."

"I would hug you," I wheezed, "or kiss you, or..something…but I know you'd feel weird." Then I competed with him for the achievement of reddest cheeks. Then I laughed a bit unstably—a gurgly giggle rather unlike my usual quiet, deep chuckle.

Did I feel stupid? I think you know the drill by now.

Kyo cocked an orange eyebrow at me. "Yeah well. I don't want that psychotic dumb-ass Shigure taking revenge on me. Anyway. Hope it helps."

"More than you know," I pledged, hugging the thing to my chest like it was Kyoko. "Kyo, you…you're…such a good…"

"Save it," he said, now looking deeply mortified. "I hate compliments, they embarrass me, okay?" He held up a palm. "I just know it'll make Tohru happy is all."

"Sorry," I spluttered, "of course. Arigato." I bowed to him probably three or four times before tiptoeing past. I didn't catch a glimpse at his face before I rounded the corner and rejoined the rest of the Sohma shopping party. Strangely, he never rejoined us himself.

Shigure's eyebrows disappeared under his tangle of wavy coal hair. "Well, well," he said, and the smugness radiating off him was almost palpable. I wanted to kiss him, per usual.

Rin seemed to be attempting to break a record for horrified facial expressions that day. She displayed another Hollywood-worthy gawp at the jar that I meekly placed in the cart, right before her eyes.

After I mustered the courage from watching Kyoko happily wriggling in Rin's arms, I met Rin's eyes.

They were unguarded and somehow desperate. They were searching me. "How in hell…?" she breathed. "WHY in hell…"

"I have a great family," I murmured back. "They help me even when I don't deserve the help. Kyo came and helped me look. There was some in the back waiting to be stocked. Is it satisfactory?"

The strangest look came over her face, one I cannot possibly describe, before she nodded mutely and handed my baby back to me. Her head was bowed as though in deep contemplation for the rest of the excursion.

My mind, however, had gone to my savior. My most unlikely of rescuers. Where was Kyo, and how could I remove that now self-imposed alienation of his from the rest of our family?


	11. My Cat's Acceptance: Part II

Not My Mother's Hair:

A Series of Vignettes from the Diary of Akito Sohma

A Fruits Basket/Furuba Fanfiction by Amber Stitt

**DISCLAIMER:** **WARNING, MANGA SPOILERS AFTER CHAPTER 98 IN THE DISCLAIMER! "Fruits Basket/Furuba" in its anime and manga formats are the creation and property of Takaya Natsuki and I in NO WAY claim ownership or profit thereof.**

**RATED PG FOR SWEARING AND MATURE THEMES (DEATH, CHILDHOOD TRAUMA). **

**This story lightly explores Akito Sohma's change-of-heart in the manga and her subsequent possible attempts to make amends with various family members. It is told from Akito's POV. If you still dislike her even after the manga brilliantly illustrates her personal pains and makes her a sympathetic character, take your cold heart elsewhere and don't bother to read this story, LOL. **

**If you do not believe that positive regard would ever occur between Tohru and Akito, you have only to acknowledge that THE MANGA ITSELF proposes peace and new friendship between them, in chapters 120-130 (released in Japan only as of July 2006). Don't flame me for sticking to CANON.**

**In this fanfiction, which will be comprised of SEVERAL SHORT CHAPTERS, Akito Sohma's gender is FEMALE, in correspondence with MANGA CANON POST-CHAPTER-98. The story depends HEAVILY on the MANGA as opposed to the anime. **

**This story takes place AFTER THE EVENTS OF CHAPTER 131 OF THE MANGA: Therefore the Sohmas are FREE from the Zodiac Curse and Akito is no longer dying. **

**WARNING: I SHIP CANON ONLY, WHICH MEANS I SHIP SHIGURE X AKITO, TOHRU X KYO, AND KURENO X ARISA. If you do not appreciate these pairings, refrain from reading this fanfiction and do not waste your time flaming me. **

**While I will probably never have time to revise this story, PLEASE ENJOY, R&R! **

Chapter 11: My Cat's Acceptance Part II

Everywhere I turn, I hurt someone  
But there's nothing I can say to change  
the things I've done  
Of all the things I hid from you  
I cannot hide the shame  
And I pray someone, something will come  
to take away the pain

There's no way out of this dark place  
No hope, no future  
I know I can be free  
But I can't see another way  
I can't face another day

Tell me where, did I go wrong  
Everyone I loved, they're all gone  
I'd do everything so differently  
but I can't turn back the time  
There's no shelter from the storm  
inside of me

There's no way out of this dark place  
No hope, no future  
I know I can be free  
But I can't see another way  
I can't face another day

I can't believe the words I hear  
It's like an answer to a prayer  
When I look around I see  
This place, this time, this friend of mine

I know its hard but you  
found somehow  
To look into your heart and  
to forgive me now  
You've given me the strength to see  
just where my journey ends  
You've given me the strength  
to carry on

I see the path from this dark place  
I see my future  
Your forgiveness has set me free  
On and I can see another way  
I can face another day!

I see the path, I can see the path  
I see the future  
I see the path from this dark place  
I see the future

I see the path, I can see the path  
I see the future

--Phil Collins

My final and ultimate test came barely three days after the grocery store confrontation.

Tohru Honda and I went out to lunch. She and Kyo were to be wed within the following six months, and she wanted the blessing of the Head of House—which was, of course, freely given. Even more so, she wanted help deciding which house on Sohma Estate would be furbished with the accoutrements of a very small, but very traditional, marriage ceremony, clearing the schedule of my many kinsmen and cousins to reserve that building, and getting the news out to guests. I informed the Sohma Rice Ball that I knew an excellent tailor—a bit less…colorful…than dear cousin Ayame—and that I would take her to my personal favorite designer's shop to help commission her wedding kimono. All very hush-hush from Kyo, who was not to see the pattern before the wedding day itself.

And Tohru had another favor to ask me, one that reddened her ears and her cheeks every time she mentioned it. Something to ask me in confidence, quite unrelated to the wedding. Something about her paternal grandfather, of whom I had become fond.

A simple task, right? It would have been if not for a cruel intervention, which kept Tohru from ever asking me that favor—at that point, at least. But then my change of…heart…no, more profound, more all-encompassing—my change of whole selfhood—would not have been validated, would not have mattered in the least, without this most difficult of trials.

The sound of a music box languishing in tempo, slowing down more and more until the beat crawls to a halt, has always depressed me deeply. I almost became like a music box in this manner, on the day of my final test. I almost became my old self, spiraling backward and downward to darkness and bitter silence once more. But, for reaping allies with my many attempts to redeem myself, I evaded such a self-inflicted trap.

Narrowly.

It began because I brought my cell phone with me to lunch, at the place where Arisa Uotani had once been a waitress, and had met Kureno. I remember the saltiness of the miso soup, the juiciness of the shrimp and avocado sushi, the sweetness and tang of the ginger leaf. Because of the company, it was the best meal I had eaten in years.

Tohru was in the middle of trying to figure out her tip, a bit flustered, when the device tinkled urgently in my handbag. The caller ID flashed the number of Main House.

I answered my phone laughing, endeared at Tohru's mathematical fumbling. Laughing, like I had that right. Laughing such a stupid clumsy child laugh, with a candor that broke through the calculated cold chuckle that I had used for so many years. That was when I heard the woman's voice on the other end.

"Akito-sama! An…accident! The maids…Your daughter!"

The world went numb and still. My extremities tingled. "What?"

My _daughter_.

My _daughter_?

Why was the word suddenly so hard to register, and yet why so very significant, like my very soul?

I cupped a cold, trembling hand over the mouthpiece. "What happened to Kyoko?" I demanded into it. I heard the brusqueness, the feral snarl, that I had not used for a handful of years. It billowed forward full force, like angry hot air from a furnace.

Tohru jolted in her seat across from me. "What's the matter?" she mouthed at me, but I couldn't keep my wits enough outside of that tinny, hysterical voice on the other end of the line to respond.

"Come quick!" the maid's voice shrieked. And then there was the awful stomach-heaving sound of disconnection. I was irrationally furious at the phone for doing that.

But somehow I was already out of my seat and at the door. I don't even remember standing. Tohru was right behind me, stammering apologies at the waiter and thrusting incorrect change at him. I think I heard her mention something about Arisa once working there, to vouch for our honesty in paying the lunch bill. But it was only when he saw my face that the restaurant manager at the door just let us leave. I don't even want to know what white-faced, gorgon horror my expression must have conveyed.

"Kyoko…" I said, in a weird tremulous soprano that was not my own voice. "Something's wrong! _There's been an accident_…!"

"It…it'll be fine..!" Tohru's breathy whisper was not entirely convincing, as she tried to steer me down the street. God forgive me, I tore free of her, viciously, and bolted for the nearest taxi. To hell with walking home.

I didn't wait for Tohru to get in with me, but somehow she managed, lugging both our purses. Her enormous, alarmed lapis eyes watched as I flung money, credit cards, everything at the front seat of the cab and gave directions in one of those voices that is "controlled" but is so shaky and taut that it is clearly the alternate to hysterical shrieking. In my humming head, deep down somewhere, I was rather awed at my ability not to break down sobbing and whining for help as I always had, under duress, in years past.

"Take it EASY, lady," the cabbie bemoaned.

"_But her daughter_—_an emergency...and.._!" Tohru began fruitlessly with clenched fists, trying so hard to mediate.

I cut her off by screaming a filthy suggestion at the driver, my eyes already hot and wet, and smacking the back of his leather seat. "_GO_!" I concluded, and apparently he was convinced. We lurched out of the parking space.

Every moment of that ride was agony. The urges to faint, throw up, hyperventilate, and curl into a ball were nearly impossible to keep at bay. Every tree, street, stupidly grinning and blissfully unaware pedestrian's face that we passed infuriated and maddened me. I wanted them to all fall down, rot, weep, suffer too, know my pain and whatever pain my child was now facing. I was spiraling, regressing downward and inward to the terrified and bitter little girl that I had been for over twenty years, at a vertigo-inducing speed.

If I lost Kyoko, it seemed like none of my efforts to mend a broken household would be worth a damn anymore. It seemed like my family should be chained by the grief and purposelessness that I would feel again. Like the cabinets I had made for the Jyuunishi should be splintered into firewood.

My own selfishness came back to strangle me.

At last we pulled into the front drive of Sohma Estate. I leapt from the car, again abandoning Tohru and my purse and all my credit cards, stumbling out of one of my sandals, just running, running with one barefoot across the painful gravel of the drive. I clanged open the wrought iron gates and kept running. I did not hear Tohru behind me, and I expected she was still in the cab dealing again with the practical matters that I had left for someone else to clean up. But I didn't care, not right then. Kyoko…!

Main House rose with a strangely ominous aura before me, and I tripped inside.

So silent.

No Kyoko.

Why was there no Kyoko?

Why was the world still functioning?

"_KYOKO_!" I exercised my lungpower to maximum capacity. The noise was bloodcurdling even to me. Lost and abandoned, hurt and afraid, keening. I looked around wildly, but couldn't see her.

I tore apart every room, oxygen trapped at the base of my throat, gurgling like I was drowning. Kyoko's bedroom, the kitchens, the master bedroom, the guest rooms, the tea room, the back porch, she was nowhere. No signs of a burning, a cutting, or any other plausible household accident.

Nor were any of the maids present. Had they all gone to the emergency room with my daughter?

And where was Shigure?

I should call Shigure.

And go to the hospital looking for her. He was probably already there with her.

Wait.

Why hadn't HE been the one to call me? I wanted suddenly and truly to kill my husband, for not calling me first—no one loved Kyoko as much as I. I would hurt him, yes. The primal urge to accomplish this task almost overwhelmed me.

I stumbled into the bathroom to pull myself together. When I was done hanging over the toilet, I flushed it and rinsed out my mouth. Then I teetered into the room with the cabinets whose handles I had carved for the Jyuunishi. Somehow my cellphone was still in one of my hands. I flipped it open and began to dial his number.

"What's up, beautiful?" His voice like dark clear calm water oozed in from the other line.

He was calm. Not the pretend-calm when something was actually wrong and he was covering it like the master charlatan that he was. No, the real calm.

Nothing—nothing that he knew of—was wrong.

"Shigure…!" Suddenly I was bawling. "Shigure, Kyoko…Kyoko?!"  
"Woah. Easy, wha..? Akito, what's wr…"

"You _fell_ for it."

Another voice.

Not my voice.

Her voice.

That woman with the oily hair.

Ren.

My god-damned "mother."

"How pathetic." She dared to keep talking, as she slunk out from behind Tohru's cabinet. She dared to keep moving, breathing, with that oilslick hair and that oilslick heart…! "You didn't recognize my voice. You're that desperate, are you?"

Shigure's voice kept buzzing with transparently concerned queries on my cell phone, but I hung it up. This was my fight. "…you _inconceivable_ bitch. You made that phone call? For WHAT purpose?!" I felt my body propelling towards her, with animal lust for blood. " YOU…! WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?!"

My mother laughed at me. Her perfect pale face contorted in a sneer, with very red lipstick, like an over-bloomed rose ready to start rotting. She dodged my lunge and then she did something so fast and so painful that I wasn't sure at first where it came from. But I was lying on my face, flat on my face, and there was an incredible sharp pain in my back. And when I looked up, she was standing over me with a fire poker.

"How dare you banish me from Sohma House, and then let your own daughter fellowship with the Cat?" Ren giggled in the middle of her own furious tirade. "I will punish you once and for all for that, daughter. I will silence your foolish judgments for good! It's all clear to me once again…! All very clear!"

I had no idea what she was talking about.

"Cat…Kyo? Kyo was here?"

"You call it by name now, do you? Clever." She struck me again, on the arm. It was the pinnacle of cruelty, the way she waited for my muscles to relax just a little bit, before dealing more damage. "You call the abomination by name, but you don't let your mother onto the grounds that Akira once walked."

"You don't know how to treat my family," I started, cautiously. "Neither do I, but I am learning. Ren, I told you to stay off the grounds for everyone's good…I offered to pay medical bills, for you to seek help…"

"I don't NEED help!" This time the white-hot blow came across my mouth. I lulled onto my side and curled into a ball as she continued to scream somewhere above me. "Not from the person who stole Akira from me! Not from the person who cheated in our bet, and won the Honda girl, the Jyuunishi, with pathetic weeping hypocritical eyes! Not from you, who stole all other eyes from me! I don't need YOU! I need HIM to look at me! LOOK AT ME!" Hands clenched around my hair, whipped back my head, a face so damnably like my own filled my vision, leering. Such mad eyes, that craved the loving gaze of only one other, who was dead. "All I need is Akira! Akira! And I will have him! You will be dead and I will have him again!"

I don't know why I smiled. And the words came unbidden, searing. "You're an idiot, Ren. You know why?" The cruelest words she had ever spoken to me, and suddenly I could use them on her. I did not stop to think before they spilled out my mouth: "After all, 'if you kill me, my soul will ascend to heaven, and I'll be the one with Akira.' I'll be with father, and you will still be here." It dawned on me, something I thought I had known, but that hit me with fullest impact in that very moment: "…Mother, I don't need you anymore, either. I have others."

Ren's whole body trembled. Miserable tears, not the first, by the sight of her drizzling mascara, drained from her empty eyes. "Then where are they?" she demanded through her teeth.

She pulled out that box—the box father's maid had given me, in a misguided attempt to comfort a little girl whose frail parent was swiftly dying, saying his soul was in it—the box that, truly, was empty. She put it down right next to my face—just out of reach—and opened it. She giggled again. She lifted the poker for a final blow to my skull.

"I…!" A very timid voice indeed. Too sweet to frighten, too gentle to command. But pure and faithful, and sincere. "I'm here!" Tohru. In the doorway, clutching our purses, gaping at Ren hovering malevolently over my body. What a shock my sick, feral mother must be to someone whose own mother had been as extraordinary as Kyoko Honda. I felt my desolate smile broadening at the thought of the Red Butterfly soaring in on her motorcycle to sweep me out of Ren's clutches. An absurd fantasy but it kept me conscious as Tohru spoke. "And it's my choice to be here too, Ren-san! I…I've never really met you, but…" Her swallowing was audible. Her nondescript chestnut hair was backlit in the doorway, transforming her into the compassionate, shy saint that she was. "…but…! A parent is a child's whole anchor! Akito-san will understand her whole world based on how you show it to her! No matter what your daughter has done, you can't just hurt her back like that! The damage has already stretched so far!"

My mother turned fully to Tohru. Still holding the poker. Ah, no. No.

"TOHRU, GET OUT!" I think I shrieked. I struggled onto my knees.

"The interloper." Ren chuckled, suddenly frostily calm. "You were a fantastic tool at the time, Honda-san, but you had an expiration date just like everyone else. Hai, you turned the chemistry of this family against me even more…" She advanced on Tohru.

"RUN!" I am sure it was me screaming the second time.

Ren lifted the poker.

Tohru didn't budge. She must have known that if she ran I would die. "Please, Ren-san!" she breathed, almost soothingly, almost like she was trying to reach even my mother with her uncanny healing powers. "Things must always, eventually, change. You must let it happen. Akito-san has."

"DON'T LEAVE ME…!" It was the last retort I would have ever expected my mother to give.

And it wasn't for Tohru, and it wasn't for me.

And I pitied Ren.

And I forgave Ren. Right that instant.

And finally, though dripping my own blood, I felt healed.

Then Ren released an animal shriek, and lunged at Tohru.

I grabbed my father's empty box without thinking. I hurled it with all my strength at my mother's head.

The box grazed her left cheek, dazing her.

Tohru gasped, and actually reached out to steady her.

Well, fine then. Fine. Perhaps I could never match people like Tohru for boundless gentleness, boundless kindness, boundless trust.

But Momiji had said something about a Foolish Traveler, and cherishing that so-called Fool forever. So I could do my damndest to keep people like Tohru safe. I could die trying. And so I, too, lunged. I seized Ren's neck and hurled her back to the ground on top of me.

She thrashed around—she was a bigger woman than me, and she had not been beaten with a fire poker, so she rolled onto her side and overpowered me quickly. Finally Tohru was screaming for help.

I don't know where he came from or how he knew.

But suddenly Kyo with his gaudy orange hair and his faceted garnet eyes was on top of us both. Silently he slid his arms around my mother's waist and with a precise, staccato squeeze, he rid her lungs of air. She paled and went limp in his arms. Uncharitably, he threw her off me, and onto the ground by the doorway.

Shigure was standing in the doorway then, over Ren, with that expression of measured placidity, tight smile and all. His eyes were keen and knowing, and he nodded once.

Kyoko, totally unharmed, was in his arms. He handed her to Tohru, whose cheeks were regaining color, and rushed to my side.

I wept. I crumbled in his arms and wept and wept.

"I was wondering," he commented quietly, "after I got that weird phone call from you. Akki, I let the servants off for the day. Kyo was on his way over to meet Tohru after your outing. Since you weren't home yet…we went to a park, and Kyo showed our butterfly some karate moves. She really had a ball with that."

The words took a moment to absorb. Then I nodded, grateful for the darkness that burying myself in my husband's arms produced. I wondered if I was getting any blood on his shirt. He always wore nice shirts and ties when he went out. God, I loved him.

"You…" Not Tohru, not Shigure, not Ren. Kyo, of all people, speaking. "You got her away from Tohru. You mighta died."

I was afraid to look up and meet my rescuer's eyes just yet. "Don't make such a big deal about it," I grumbled.

"…Arigato. Tohru's…ya couldn't have done much more for me." Kyo cleared his throat. His voice was oddly thick. I understood. I accepted.

"It was nothing," was all I managed to reply.

"Even my love turns on me." Ren.

I emerged from my Shigure-cocoon, ready to defend.

He stopped me, with but a single finger on my lips. He turned expressionlessly to face my mother, rousing in the doorway. "Ren, you were not my love." His voice was acid, biting quiet acid. He leaned over her threateningly. "You were my mistake. That's all. Tohru. Get Kyoko out of here, hmm? Kyo, call the police."

Tohru obliged swiftly. For an instant as she passed my mother, Kyoko's wide, scrutinizing gaze, so unnervingly perceptive in a child, pierced Ren. And my mother was nullified, rendered speechless.

Perhaps my father had spoken quelling words through my daughter. I may never know what passed between Kyoko and Ren. All I know is she didn't open her mouth again until the police, with a consultant from the psychiatric ward of Tokyo Hospital, came and took her away.

I have not spoken to Ren since.

Perhaps I should have. But I weigh Tohru's wise, gentle words heavily in my heart: At some point, everything must change. And we can only hope for change that mobilizes better days to come.

Explanations for the cruel prank and assault came later that evening through the police report, when we were all in bathrobes and patched up by the faithful Hatori.

Kyo and Shigure had indeed taken Kyoko out to teach her some karate moves in a nearby park. Unfortunately, Kyo's father—not Kazuma, but his biological father—had been visiting main house and saw Kyo with the daughter of the head of house, my Kyoko. Just as he had been in the grocery a few days past, the man was enraged. He found a servant on her way out the door for the day off. She told him that I was out with Tohru—his "abominable" son's girlfriend. He sought the most damaging person possible to "rectify" the situation between Kyo, the "monster," and future head of Sohma House. He sought out, and tipped off, Ren, through Yuki's father and mother, socialites with every conceivable phone number in their address book. He fully expected Ren to harm Tohru, and threaten Kyo into submission, in the process of harming me.

On the plus side, when he was called in for questioning, Kyo's father received a nice juicy restraining order.

Nevertheless, I was appalled and I said so in no uncertain terms.

Kyo was unsurprised. "That's my old man," he murmured, gazing at the television, featuring some brainless kid's show called Mogeta, numbly.

"He doesn't deserve you!" I growled bitterly.

For some reason, this earned a surprised and crooked smile from my Cat, sitting on the ground in front of Shigure and me, curled up with Tohru under a blanket. "Ano…bout time ya noticed," he retorted with a boyish blush.

"Kyo's reeed," Shigure sang, an impromptu melody which Kyoko, sandwiched between Shigure and me, happily joined.

"You're corrupting her," Kyo hissed at my husband.

"He doesn't deserve you," I repeated. "Kazuma is your real father anyway."

He swallowed, and nodded. "Arigato, Akito-sama. I'll try and believe ya."

"Drop the formalities!" I snapped. "All that's obsolete now anyway. Good grief."

My Cat appeared, then, to be highly amused at me, from the midst of his mysterious self-imposed gloom. That gloom lifted as he mulled this concept over. "I guess it is, innit?" He snorted a laugh and returned his gaze to the television. Apparently he recognized a kindred spirit of spunky verbal barbs when he saw one. I was just glad that he could even conceive of me as a kindred spirit, now.

"Well anyway, you share the same hair color as my daughter's namesake…" A pathetic attempt at a joke.

"Tohru's mom told me she dyed her hair, actually," he retorted, with a flat, "that-was-a-stupid-joke" gaze leveled right at me. Well, he was right. I freely admit my monumental lameness in many matters, these days.

"It's true!" Tohru interjected, blissfully unaware of my awkward state, and Kyo's amusement at it.

My cheeks burned. I pretended to be imperious and confident a moment longer, even though my entire family saw through that façade at this point. "Well, Tohru," I haughtily continued. "About that favor for your dear grandfather. Shall we step out onto the back porch and discuss it?"

Why in hell did she look like a caged fawn under the gaze of a tigress?

Don't answer that, reader.

"Er, um, watashi…"

I glared—lovingly, I hope—at her. "Come on, Tohru-chan, out with it."

"Go for it," Kyo mumbled to his fiancée, brushing some strands of her hair over her shoulder the better to whisper in her ear.

Though her blush now easily rivaled mine (and yes, Shigure was giggling and singing "Tohru's reddd tooooo"), she was galvanized to action by his encouragement. "Very well, I will do my best to ask you this favor!" she chirped, pumping her fists, absurdly and adorably cheerful.

My embarrassed, proud demeanor was shattered. I barked a laugh, and covered my mouth. "Gomen, gomen," I chortled, when Tohru looked all the more bewildered.

Kyo wiped his face in an effort to look tired instead of equally prone to fond laughter. He pushed Tohru gently to her feet. "Go," he chuckled. "Conquer mountains and stuff."

"What am I, Fuji-sama?" I cracked back.

"Sometimes I wonder," Shigure mused out loud.

"Shut up," I told him. "Flattery will get you nowhere."

"In the evenings, you sing a different tune, wife."

"Okay, I have no need for that information," Kyo moaned.

Tohru looked even more confused.

"Mama's reddd," Kyoko giggled.

I covered my face and exited to the porch that instant. Tohru followed, blinking, leaving behind Kyo and my tittering husband and child.

The evening was serene, the sky clear and jeweled with stars. I sought some guiding constellation, cheeks cooling, as I waited for the Rice Ball to speak.

"Oji-san is sick…and I…I want him to see my wedding. I know…I know that for every 'nice to meet you,' there is a 'goodbye'…I know that everyone has a time…but I don't want to lose him yet…"

I could hear the choke, the lump obstructing her throat, without even looking. "What can I do? Is it that you want me to ask Hatori to look at him? It depends on the illness…"

"Cancer. Colon cancer."

My blood froze. My extremities tingled. Hatori was a brilliant doctor, but he was no oncologist. There was nothing he could do about something as dismal and frequently terminal as colon cancer. "Tohru, we…I…"

"I..I know…I know! But Akito-sama—"

"Chan. Akito-chan. Or A-Chan, if you like to go by your friend Saki's style. I can't believe she figured out that I was a woman so fast…"

I could tell just how grave Tohru's problem was by the fact that this allusion to Hanajima-san's eccentricities didn't even extract a nervous giggle from her. She just gawked back at me, pale and stricken.

"But seriously, Tohru, where is this going?" I gently probed. I envisioned her as one of the white birds in my back gardens, crooning about my head, lighting timidly on my hand.

"A—Akito-chan! Please! Don't hate me for asking this…but…" Her eyes squeezed shut. "But we need money! Kyo and I need money! For the surgery to remove the cyst!"

A long pause. I waited for more. Surely mere monetary assistance could not be all that this precious child, who had saved my very soul, could be asking of me.

Not above me.

Not below me.

Beside me, Tohru. Tohru, my first real adulthood friend.

"And?" I urged. It was almost an insult to our friendship, the peace we had finally won, that this could be all she wanted from me.

"…And what?" She peeped open one eye at me, confounded.

"That's it?"

"It?! It! Akito-chan! It is so presumptuous by itself!"

"Ah, Tohru." I chuckled, slowly rubbing my temples. "Tohru."

"Oh no! Oh dear! You ARE angry!"

I laughed harder, and simply rushed forward to embrace her, pulled her by the shirt collar up against me, nestling my face against her neck, as I had on the day that the curse was fully lifted from the Sohma Clan. We stood there for another respite from sound before I began. "Tohru Honda…you're my twin. I mean, my mirror twin. My inverse. We're two sides of the same person. I've had this figured out for a while. And you are the one who inspired me to change. You've taken care of my family and shown me how to do the same, by your example. Come on. Don't embarrass me by making me have to make this any more plain: I have no hesitation helping you in any form or fashion, because you became a part of my family a long time ago—before even I realized it. And I have this funny weakness, you see…for keeping my family close to me."

Tohru was weeping quietly into my kimono. The wetness on my neck made me feel oddly more courageous. It meant I mattered to her, too.

"Thank you for being kind enough to need me, Tohru," I breathed. "The money—whatever money you need—is yours."

"What did yo…" She hiccupped, trailing off, pulling back to look me in the eyes. A strangely tender, maternal gesture: She brushed my bangs from my gaze. My cheeks heated again, as I felt transformed to every bit a helpless little girl once more. "My mom said that…my mom said just that….to Kyo-kun when he was a little boy. She said 'I'll be okay because there are people in this world kind enough to need me.' And…and it's so true, Akito-sam…chan. That's why we're all going to be okay."

I gulped down the lump in my own throat. "Well…there you go, then," I murmured, hoping my grin wasn't quite so stupid looking as it felt. "We'll all be okay."

The morning of Honda-oji-sama's surgery, I called a family meeting. There was one last thing I had to make certain of.

My mother had forgotten her empty box from my father when she had been escorted to Tokyo Hospital. Tohru's friend Saki, with her vague purple stare, had called it "fate," and told me to do something about it.

I had been ready to laugh off her remark when Kyoko crawled over to the box and stared inside it with an intensity I had never seen her display—except when looking at my mother, at Shigure, or at me. Like recognition. Recognition of a kinsman. Recognition of something meant to occur.

And that had been what had convinced me to call the meeting.

I expected a few absences—though out of Yuki, Kyo, and Isuzu, only Isuzu proved me correct, and did not attend. It was alright. I knew what I was still asking of all my cousins. It would still take effort for us to all get along, feel safe and comfortable in the same room, healed, for a long while.

But that was the exciting part. We had our whole lives ahead of us, to do that healing.

"Thank you all for coming," Kyoko in my husband's lap beside me, I greeted my family cordially, with a nod of my head. I clothed myself in the lady's kimono that Shigure had given me the very day I had confessed my real gender to the Jyuunishi and begged their forgiveness, and released them of my hold. I wore it for a reason. "Not many of you know of this trinket, passed from my father Akira to me, via his chief maidservant." I held up the little red brocaded box for all to see. I opened the lid and showed them the void inside.

Yuki, sandwiched next to Ayame, exchanged a confused scowl with his older brother, who gave a flamboyantly exaggerated shrug.

Kureno, it seemed, stiffened in his spot between Yuki and Hatori, turning to cast our family doctor a deeply concerned look.

Hatori didn't budge.

Kyo narrowed his eyes and muttered, "Is that it?" to Tohru, who nodded.

Kisa, Hiro, Momiji, Hatsuharu, Ritsu, and Kagura all proffered a confused but polite expression, blinking, at the pretty but apparently pointless empty box.

Ever the blunt one, Hiro blurted, "Uh, it's empty, Akito."

"Exactly," I said.

"Akki-ko, are you feeling well?" Shigure quipped, even though he knew precisely what my plan was.

For the second time, Kyoko reached for the silken red lid and fingered it fervently.

"Of course I am," I retorted firmly. "The box is empty. It always has been, since I was born, since well before that. And that's been our problem. That emptiness, of the Bond we once had, the pointlessness and cruel arbitrariness of it. We never really got to know one another as us—just as us, possessed. Hai, hai, the box is empty. And we're going to fill it."

A pause.

Then someone was slowly, loudly applauding, his two-toned head bobbling in accord. Hatsuharu. "Rin'll find out," he added, around his applause.

"I'm counting on that," I mumbled in his direction. "Arigato." I am not sure when praise became so embarrassing to me, but at any rate I continued speaking to pass the attention from myself back to the subject. "If it is not too much trouble, I should like to see that each of you places in this box something self-representational…something personal, significant. It could even just be a slip of paper with a fond memory. A trinket. An object that reveals something bigger. Please understand…I will never look inside. I will never breach your privacy, or your trust, again. But the box will be full of things that matter to each of us. And I would like to see that as the beginning of a real bond among the members of this family. But the decision is yours to make."

With that I stood, bowed to them all, took Kyoko from Shigure, and excused myself. I did not dare look back and witness their reactions to my proposal. I did not expect ever to know what was in Akira's Box, nor did I expect to know who agreed to my symbolic whim.

I did not know that they would take mercy on me so completely. But I know now, and how I will treasure that fact, that event, until I breathe my last.

To the closing point of this story, reader: the wait in the hospital, for Tohru's grandfather to come out of surgery.

I had purchased for myself one of those baby satchels that a parent straps to the chest, like a papoose. Kyoko hung merrily from it as I made my way, in a modest sun dress, to the waiting room where Tohru sat. Kyo had found a local job as a karate instructor, and he was teaching a late class that evening. He had no way of calling off work; every bit of spare change was precious to the engaged couple, with their modest income, particularly while saving up for their wedding.

To this day, I don't know why she called me to wait for him with her.

She could have called Arisa or Saki, her girlfriends since childhood. She could have called Yuki, her confidante and male best friend.

But she called me instead.

Maybe it was because she was still thinking about everyone besides herself first: maybe she knew I would crave that validation, that chance to be supportive for someone inside the family. Or maybe it was because I was the only other genuine orphan she knew anywhere near her age—because I would understand best how terrified she felt for her last link to either of her parents to be wheeled out of that surgery intact.

I will never know. But I am glad she did call me. So very glad.

I found the waiting room empty, and inquired at the desk as to why. The nurse behind the computer had a round, dimpled, maternal face. Something about her made a lump rise in my throat, as she explained to me that Tohru had been so nervous that she had been admitted past staff lines and was waiting in the hallway directly outside the surgical room.

I begged to be let in with her, and the nurse took pity on me. I am sure it had something to do with Kyoko's sweet and expectant facial expression.

And Tohru I found: sitting on a backless stool outside the ominously white swivel doors. She turned at the sound of my approach, and for a moment my stomach turned in fear for her at the tears cascading down her cheeks. But she shook her head happily at my alarm, and choked out, "H-he'll be fine--! They just came and told me he's out of danger! It was a success—they're closing him up!"

A great gust of air blew out my lips, stirring the black hair on the top of Kyoko's head. My daughter giggled as I dashed over to Tohru and embraced her from behind.

"Lean on me," I said. "I don't mind."

And the exhausted girl did just that, her eyes fluttering closed.

I don't know how long I stood there like that, bracing Tohru upright, allowing her to sleep, to be the one saved and cherished for once, rather than the other way around. My mind went back to the day she took my hand on that cliff, and then fell, and nearly died, one last time before at last the guilt was washed from the recollection forever. It was okay now: I belonged to people who, of their own free will, believed that I mattered. Mistakes could be forgiven, cast over the shoulder, like a bright wishing penny into a cleansing fountain.

Someone, a woman, cleared her throat behind me.

I craned my neck backwards.

It was Isuzu.

Wearing not black, but a shirt and skirt set that were white, pure snowy white, with a gentle floral pattern of red, vibrant life-giving red, and bright red stiletto boots that reminded the forgetful that her spirit was still that of a fighter.

_Oh God. _

She gave a tentative smirk at my shock; her dark, bottomless eyes, that of prey and predator all at once, but most of all, the eyes of a creature deeply wounded, still unnerved me. "Don't look so horrified. I bring good tidings and shit like that."

"…Ah." It's said that skittish mares are less likely to kick if you make no sudden movements; so it was with Isuzu. I held still as she inched closer, holding, of all things…

Akira's box.

"Ha'ru insisted that I be the one to bring it. Damned if I know why, but he's the only person in the world…more stubborn than me…besides maybe you two….so, uh…We just got done putting stuff in it, and he figured Tohru, and maybe you, might need to see something cheerful…is she alright?"

"Just sleeping. Exhausted. Her grandfather's going to be alright, it seems," I replied. My voice was about an octave too high, and far too eager. I tried to smile. _Please don't hate me_, the faintest echoes of my insecure voice of childhood called. _Please give me a chance._ One last time, before that burning, sour, frightened and angry voice was extinguished forever.

I don't think Isuzu can read minds, but it was uncanny how she rolled her eyes just then, snorted, and shoved the box into the arm I wasn't using to stroke Kyoko's hair. "Stop being dramatic. Open it."

I blinked. "Um. Isuzu-san…"

"Call me Rin, damn it. And don't be so jumpy. I doubt you have shears on you this time."

I winced. "Er, yeah. Not something I carry in my purse these days. But uh…Rin…I promised I'd never look inside the box."

"The family took a vote, seeing as we're a democracy now," Rin threw back dryly. "We decided you should be allowed to look."

"…Oh."

"Good grief. Don't cry…" She reddened.  
"I'm not," I lied. "I'm uh glad to see you're growing out your hair…"

"It felt like time. You too, I guess. You look…girly. You're actually sort of pretty."

I bobbed my head in thanks as Kyoko took a fistful of the hair in question. She yanked my hair, hair that was not my mother's only because I chose to walk a path different than hers, and I tolerantly ignored Kyoko's loving abuse as all new mothers are swiftly able to manage. I chuckled and kissed her forehead, shifting weight behind Tohru, who still peacefully napped.

Rin moved out of sight. For a moment I thought she'd left.

And then to my astonishment I felt her standing behind me, slightly taller, slightly stronger, supporting me as I was supporting Tohru.

"Like I said," she breathed, "I felt like it was about time."

"Open, mama," Kyoko trilled.

"I'll do just that, butterfly," I whispered, as the chains, the fullness of emptiness, the blame and guilt, the endless wandering and the solitude, fell off. Weightless. Forgiven. New.

And with my family leaning on me and holding me up, before me and behind me, I opened the box.

I cannot tell you what was in that box, reader—what my family members donated to the cause of our loving union. But I can tell you this as you and I part ways at last:

It was the beginning of every good change and every real bond.

Our beginning.


End file.
